Only 100 years to wait til 21/11/2111. I am looking forward to it very much. Put the date in your diary. Let's all meet up on Shepherd's Bush Grey in the year 2111, on the 21st November at 11 minutes passed nine pm and all shout "It's twenty-one eleven on Twenty-one! Eleven! Twenty-one Eleven!" It's something to live for. If you feel you might not live that long, please spawn children and pass on instructions for them or their spawn to do so. It'll be quite an occasion, presuming we're still using the same calendar and clock in the future (and that they still have the concept of time). Shepherd's Bush Grey will still be there for sure and it will be grey.
Today I was interviewed by BBC Radio Scotland for a show about comedy writing (didn't I do one of these for them in Edinburgh?), illustrated with audio clips from my now long career. It's rather sobering to be played a clip of something that you wrote over two decades ago, especially if you have no memory of it. They had found an old sketch from Weekending about clamping tramps. If you had played it to me without telling me it was written by me and Stew I would not have known. It made me laugh, which was a surprise (given it was from Weekending). There was also clips of Stew and me sounding like we were 12 from Lionel Nimrod and Fist of Fun, before something of a leap to last week's Objective, which hopefully didn't give the impression that I haven't done anything since 1993. Not sure when the show will be broadcast, but it was interesting to revisit the past.
Which is something I would be doing this evening too as it was time for the annual Christmas meet up of me and some of my friends from University. We were doing it early this year as I am away on holiday for the first two weeks of December and Stew is gigging most nights at the Leicester Square Theatre. This is a tradition that started as long ago as that Weekending clip and it's something we have done annually, though in the beginning it was a free for all and everyone we knew would come, though at some point in the last fifteen years it became a group of nine of us, with none of us really understanding why we are invited and some others of our friends are not. We only thought to start documenting the event with a photo in 2003, which we put up on a secret website, so now we have nine photos of us all getting gradually older and more fucked. Each year I joke that one of us will be dead by next year and I am still waiting for my prediction to come true, but it does mean that if I myself die I will briefly punch the air just beforehand knowing that my prediction has come true. Most years recently one of us has managed to spawn a child and only two of us remain unmarried and childless and have stayed true to the devil-may-care refusal to grow up spirit that we had all had back in 1991. I feel sorry for the ones who haven't managed to stay young at heart and free of commitment. What losers!
Usually we dine in a restaurant with the word "Gay" in the title, because we are mature and amusing men, but there are only about two restaurants with the word gay in the title and we were getting bored of them, so instead we went to "The Italian Kitchen", a dining establishment we had frequented often in the 1990s, but rarely since then. It hadn't changed much. The decor and the prices seemed exactly the same, but maybe we had just got used to more expensive restaurants in our comfortable middle-age. I recalled that one of the last times I had come here a waitress had accidentally (at least I hope this was the case, she might have felt I deserved it for loud talking or whatever) poured an entire carafe of red wine down my back. But there was no such incidents this time. We just drank a bit too much, ate Italian food, confronted our mortality and the death of our youth and reminisced. It was a lot of fun, though it's sort of sad to think that we now pretty much only see each other once a year. As quick as those months fly by nowadays.
Most, though not quite all, of these men first met up at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1987, where we slept on the floor in a Masonic Temple. Nearly a quarter of a century later we're still friends which is rather wonderful and I am glad we weren't able to see the fat and/or bald monstrosities that we would become. It is good that aging is a slow and imperceptible experience. But if you're at the start of doing something similar do make sure you start taking the photos now, so you can try to spot the year when the joy and hope finally left your eyes.
Ah time, with your winged boots and hat. I always thought you looked like a cunt and I was right.
