It’s just gone 10am. I’m sitting indoors, in my outdoor clothes, which is never a good start. Regular listeners, readers, will know I rarely wear my outdoor clothes indoors but I’m waiting for the return of my mixing desk which packed out on me some 10 days ago. Perfect timing for Christmas that was, eh. The first attempted delivery via DPD failed, three days before Christmas and so it went back to the repair outlet, I’d sent it to and this morning it’s the Royal Mail’s turn to see if they can deliver by 1pm. I have a big yellow post-it notes on my desk reminding me to clean my chair afterwards.
I don’t really go for end-of-year-reviews with anything. It’s that time of year where your favourite radio station will be overflowing with the fill-in presenters, the utility guys who can never nail down a regular slot, while all the big names have a well-earned break before returning on the 2nd of Jan. Thankfully, one of my favourite presenters, LBC’s Shelagh Fogarty is already back on air to make the afternoon’s more bearable.
Christmas was as anticipated. I lost the daily routine I really need to function, and let’s face it, even with that, this year for me has been a pretty underwhelming one. Looked at through my stand-up glasses, I could say it was a successful one, but I regard myself and always will, as a writer, and with my writing goggles on, the year has been extremely poor. I’ve just not got going. The stand-up has definitely played a part in that. But so has family stuff. As expected, the hospital featured over Christmas. While the A&E queue was predictably long, I can’t complain too much because we were out of there within several hours and really we should’ve been in a couple of days earlier for something else for one of my elderly relatives but the NHS being what it has been for a long time now, predictably failed to call my relative in when they were supposed to be seen. It sums up the state of the country right now.
Next Christmas, for me, will have a very dramatically altered personal landscape. The immediate future has some very difficult situations likely to come to their end. You think you’re ready for these things but until they’re here, you never know.
The last month I have seen, locally, crack smokers openly smoking their pipes in broad daylight right outside Brixton Sports Centre, this is at lunchtime, one road away from the local police station, no police, predictably in sight. I have seen a blatant shoplifter eating food he wasn’t paying for in a Lidhell store threatening the three male staff who had the ‘audacity’ to try and search his bag. Again, no police in sight, though I did see, unusually, a quartet of four young wispy bearded officers about a minute later casually strolling past the local shopping centre. This is a year, if we briefly do go in for the review thing, where I was attacked by a local female crack user I’d not long before seen having a punch up on the upper deck of a southbound number two bus with another girl, after I had the temerity to tell her to do one when she started abusing me at my local bus stop. Looking back, I probably did well to get out of that one relatively unscathed. I had come close to knocking her sharing can size of Kestrel Super out of her arms because she’d irked me that much, but by the time I got to my gig that night in Piccadilly, probably the only stand-up in the country that night taking to the stage after being assaulted by a drug addict on the way to a show, I could see the situation could’ve been so much worse.
I’m still trying to beg one more gig spot this year. I’d given myself a target for the year and frustratingly, I’m one short of that. I look back at the 12 nights I took off in late October and early November and now see a missed opportunity. I also missed out on a gig last week because I was shopping for a close friend who’d finally gone down with Covid.
Last night’s gig was one I’ve done several times before. It’s a difficult space, a transitory one in terms of audience at a complex that is essentially a bazaar for various activities so you can have people walking in and out of your sets while you’re on stage. I can live with that. Less easy to deal with is the improv finale all the acts have to participate in at the end of the show. It’s not really my thing. For me, improv can never compete against a well-crafted line that’s been chopped and changed and tweaked and retweaked (all of which may be the same thing) until it’s right. Sure, there might be one moment in improv where someone says something very funny but that one moment of spontaneity will never be enough to get me to like improv. I get that as a performer it can make you looser on stage. Totally. But funnier? No. Still, I got through it.
As I returned home last night, I reflected once more at the lack of nerves before going onstage and even for the improv. Despite not being comfortable doing the latter, there were no nerves. I can just grit my teeth and get on with this. This is in stark contrast to the running. Yet, after close to 750 runs since June 2019, there has never been a single run that I was able to begin without a deep dread of the discomfort and utter boredom that was to follow. How at one point I was running close to 20ks I’ll never understand. Maybe it was the bad state my life was in at the moment I started running, perhaps the pandemic played a part. The thing is, despite the running being responsible for a bad injury, I can’t deny that mentally it helped me enormously. I was running in the early noughties but stopped because my dad, an absolute fitness fanatic who regularly covered marathon distances, died whilst running. Sometimes I’ve questioned whether I’m tempting fate by running at this age. However fit I’ve got, I’m still nowhere near his league and another difference between us is he always loved the running and any form of exercise. While I exercise six days a week, I absolutely loathe it. But clearly my life had reached a point in 2019 where I needed to do something way out of my comfort zone and that was the running. And when the running wasn’t enough, I returned to stand-up. Everything seems to have become about becoming good at doing things I don’t like. Maybe it’s time to get back to doing what I love?
Mood-wise, I think the dread of having to receive the mixing desk, check it’s now working, get all my settings on the faders reset, test everything (all this after wiping it down) before paying for the fix, is definitely having an effect on me. I just don’t do well with tech stuff. It’s never interested me and if I’m not using something regularly, I forget how to use it.
I’m still awaiting my date for the scan on the foot injury and for the most part am laying off the running. I’ve gone from 30k a week to just 5k right now, which is a concern. While I’m in shape, I’m worried about the lack of cardio. The fitness has been hard-earned over the last 4.5 years of running and I don’t want to lose it.
I’ve spoken to too many experts over the last couple of years on the damage running, a high impact activity, can and does cause and I surprised at the significant percentage of runners who have to quit running through injury rather than old age. I’ve spoken with cyclists, climbers and swimmers, activities which are all far easier on the body and keep you as fit, in the case of swimming, fitter. Now, clearly I’m not going to start climbing. I can barely write. Believe me, I’m not going to start climbing when my productivity is so poor. Plus, more importantly, I don’t have a head for heights, despite dream flying for over three decades (originally in my Z-Bed). I remember the early years of the dream flying, the vertigo would actually wake me up. As for the cycling, well, I have no road sense which is why I don’t drive. Put me on a bike and stick me on the road, and I know for certain I don’t make it back home, ever.
That leaves the swimming. I like swimming. It’s a lot more fun than running. And of course, it’s better for you. I just don’t like all the stuff around it. The getting changed, the walk to the pool, the pre-pool shower despite the fact you’ve just showered at home. The pre-pool shower is swimming pool etiquette. There’s the usual poor state of the showers too. Also, I don’t understand how so few swimmers use some aquatic shoe or FLIP FLOPS (when you see how many c***s wear these in the summer when they’re nowhere near water, it enrages me, yet when the FLIP FLOP comes into its own – i.e – close to water, they shun it). Then, and most difficult of all, there’s the difficulty of trying to find a good time to swim, which basically means when there’s no schoolkids in the pool. The state of Brixton Sports Centre and the trouble around it means I’ve been trying another local centre, but they only have one pool and it’s annoying when it’s full of schoolkids. I keep being told to come after 1pm. I turn up after 1pm and there’s another class going in. “Come back after 2pm. It should be okay.” So, you return with your swimming gear hoping this time you finally make it into the water. It’s far from ideal. I’m not attempting it again until after the kids go back to school next week.
Yesterday afternoon, pre-gig, I made it to the back-up café only to find the wi-fi was down so I couldn’t do much work. I caught up on some reading for my historical football podcast When Shorts Were Short and had to wait ages to be served a second decaf owing to how ridiculously busy the place was again. Also, IT WAS TOO HOT IN THERE. I was in there on Christmas Eve, and it was so hot I had to remove several layers and spent the hour in there in my t-shirt. In December. Thankfully, THE café re-opens in seven days after their disappointingly long Christmas closure.
I did manage to down tools over the last week which I needed to, and found myself binge watching ‘1883’, the 10-hour ‘Yellowstone’ prequel. By last Christmas I was binge watching ‘Downton Abbey’ which I’d refused to engage with during its peak years a decade earlier, because, well, I’m like that.
1883 was outstanding. The show centred around the doomed journey of a handful of cowboys escorting some German and Slavic pioneers on the Oregon Trail, a period of history that fascinates me. Sam Elliott was his usual masterful self, while husband and wife country singers Tim McGraw and Faith Hill played a husband and wife travelling to the west with their two kids, the eldest of whom, 18-year-old Elsa, was played superbly by Isabel May, mostly known for sitcoms until now. I wasn’t expecting much but the legacy of David Milch’s all-time great ‘Deadwood’ has been that any subsequent western shows have used that as their yardstick, so even if, as is likely, they’re inferior, the drop off isn’t as big as it might’ve been.
1883 came close but it was a hard watch. The last two episodes are as emotional as it gets. I must be getting soft. I had to keep telling myself it’s ‘just’ a TV show. But that approach didn’t quite work. I’ll include no spoilers. It was an outstanding piece of work, but I wasn’t expecting it to be as intensely moving as those final two episodes were.
I subsequently read and listened to interviews with Timothy McGraw and Faith Hill on their roles in those final episodes and I can totally believe how difficult those scenes must’ve been to film. What makes it the show even greater in my eyes is it was filmed during the pandemic. Every show I’ve seen that was filmed during the pandemic was inferior to its previous series (if it was a recurring series) and this includes the otherwise brilliant ‘Succession’. Series 3 saw a big drop off from the level of the imperious previous year and I struggled to continue watching it. ‘1883’ (why didn’t I just go for the italics with these show titles) is the only show I’ve watched that you can’t tell was filmed during the pandemic. Sam Elliott deservedly received the Screen Actors Guild Awards for best male actor for his role.
And that’s me for 2023.
Hope 2024 is a good one for you.
Twitter: @1607WestEgg
FB: @DRTcomedy
Instagram: @1607westegg
Threads: @1607westegg
TikTok: @1607WestEgg
BlueSky @1607westegg
2023 has been a total s***show. Wishing you strength for the year ahead.