The ever-changing date of birth, inflexible necks, the 'tomato years' and mouth-breathing
Thursday
If you enjoy this post, do please subscribe. Increasing my subscriber list will allow me to do more with this page in the long-term. Thank you.
I’m currently mouth-breathing in the café after an outbreak of an all-too familiar malodorous aroma here. I don’t really need to expand on that.
I’ve bagged myself a table by the radiator which is on today. I think even the café is heat-rationing this winter.
I’ll savour today’s first latte, worn out by a mid-morning trip to my aunt and uncle’s. Some official paperwork has arrived from Spain for my uncle as he sets about renewing his passport. My aunt questions why he even wants to bother renewing the passport at this stage of his life. My uncle disregards this view my aunt never hesitates to make when the subject of contacting the Spanish Consulate to progress his renewal comes up. In a new development, the paperwork that has arrived from Spain via his brother, now has a new date of birth for my uncle. Not for the first time. It’s only in the last couple of years that we learnt my uncle is likely to have been born the day after the birthday he's been celebrating his entire life. But according to this new paperwork, my uncle was actually born the DAY AFTER this new birthday, making him 48 hours younger than the birthdays he was celebrating for the first 80 years of his life. The admin of post-Civil War Spain leaves a lot to be desired and is arguably up there with the appalling admin behind so many of the nights on the comedy circuit.
I had a good gig last night. The MC had put together a strong line-up, each of us doing 10 minutes and the night was over within an hour and a quarter. There was no interval, which I think is a good idea actually. It means comics in the second half aren’t performing in front of a smaller audience than those had in the first half.
One of my favourite comics on the circuit, an older guy, was on. His advice from the time I returned to the circuit back in February of this year has been invaluable. It was only my third or fourth gig back when I first met him, and he sought me out with some encouragement and valuable pointers. It was the highlight of what hadn’t been a bad night, but the venue was an absolute stinker – literally. The MC said during the night that alcohol had been served on that site for over a thousand years. It certainly smelt like it. I saw quite a few cartoon drunks in there that night.
We rarely gig together for the simple but baffling reason that this act seems to be scratching around for gigs. I suspect some promoters see him as awkward. He might be, but then so am I and many others (there’s nothing wrong with having an opinion) and I’m doing a few good nights that this guy could comfortably do. 100 gigs on, having him also on the bill last night gave me some extra motivation because you always want to impress the peers whose work you rate. If I ran my own night, I’d have him on. It’d be a no-brainer. I’m not a laugh out loud guy but he got a big one out of me last night.
It was a wet and windy night as I travelled into Covent Garden. I have to say, the inclement weather aside, I am enjoying getting to gigs on winter nights. Something about it elevates the level of excitement I’m feeling.
By my standards, I travelled relatively light, eschewing the bag I normally travel with and taking my Kindle rather than the usual physical book. The venue offers a free beer and pizza, but I’ve never managed to get either out of them. The owners are a rude bunch and gave me short thrift when, prompted by the aforementioned fellow act, I asked for a non-alcohol beer. I ended up with a seriously flat diet coke instead. There was no way that was from a can. That was some nearly finished bottle that had been knocking around for a month or so, with the staff just waiting for the next teetotal mug to come along so they could finish off the bottle. I took one sip and left it. Meantime, having eaten, I didn’t get the on-the-house pizza, a good move I told myself as I watched another comic struggle to cut his way through the tough dough last night.
Here in the café, at the next table to my left, a couple of Germans, mother and young son, are tucking into a cooked breakfast. The boy, like a junior version of Dominic Raab, says they don’t like tomatoes, dismissing them as ‘nonsense’.
I have to say I myself have never been a huge lover. I’m not a big salad lover in general so anything that tends to shine best in a salad rarely ends on my plate. But ‘back in the day’, I did have my ‘tomato years’. As a kid, one of my oldest friends, a half-English, half-Polish kid, one of the funniest people I’ve ever known, who lived around the corner on the most dog-muck ridden road I’ve ever encountered, would have me over for ‘tea’ regularly on a Sunday evening. It was always a prelude to a normal evening Sunday meal for me. I was a chubby kid who spent his early years just eating. I also wanted to be English, badly. So, these invites for ‘tea’ were for me another way to assimilate into the culture, so I never turned these invites to tea down. Indeed, I tried to reciprocate, inviting my friend over for this ‘tea’ thing that I could barely grasp. My mum never quite knew what to do and if anything, would end up putting out too much food.
Over at my friend’s, we’d have this delicious Polish sausage, Kielbasa, but there’d be tomatoes too. For some reason, I made out I loved tomatoes – I’ve never understood why I did that - and would take a tomato, sprinkle it with salt, and eat it. I never ate tomatoes at home, but for years, every other Sunday at my friends, I’d persist with this illusion that I loved the tomato.
M hasn’t come in today. I suspect the unpleasant weather has kept her indoors today. Yesterday she only made a fleeting visit to the café as she was on her way to Paddington to book her train ticket to Cardiff to visit her daughter at Christmas. I wondered why she couldn’t have done this online. Putting a hand on me, she took a deep breath. “Now you’re sounding like my son. He was telling me to book it online, but I like to do these things in person.”
Old school.
I’ve just taken a couple of traditional nostril-breaths. Whatever foul smell had overwhelmed the café fifteen minutes ago has now thankfully gone.
Early Jim, the easy-to-smirk regular, holds court over by the door in his softly spoken tones. Catching sight of me, he gives me the usual right-index finger gesture and that smile.
Some of the regulars, like Argentina ’78, a man whose swarthy features remind me of my late dad and who in the summer, like my dad, thinks nothing of wearing disgracefully old short shorts not fashionable since the early ‘90s, has rarely been in the café this winter. The last time I saw him, he told me that by not coming in here, he’d worked out he’d saved something like a couple of hundred pounds one month. I can understand that thinking and it makes complete sense during these exceptionally hard times. However, if I were to hole myself up in the flat and not come here, or even the back-up café, to do the right thing admittedly, and save money, mentally I’d really struggle. There are some things money can’t buy. What this place gives me is priceless.
It's not been easy getting the second latte here today. Sometimes you need the café to be a bit busier, so the staff are more attentive. It does frustrate me that both here and in the back-up café, neck-turning wise, the staff don’t seem to be the most flexible. If I was a waiter, what would set me apart from most staff would be my head-turning. I was a goalkeeper in my football days, and my dad, in his relentless drills, was always impressing upon me the need to keep looking side to side and behind me, when distributing the ball or working out where I was in terms of proximity to the goal. To that, and this was my own addition, I’d always be scanning that notorious Clapham Common turf for dog muck.
It's looking like this winter, so far anyway, is going to be a wet one. It’s an uncomfortable time of year as inevitably there comes a point for a writer where you’re going to feel the rain getting into your shoes and there’ll be no getting away from the fact the footwear will not survive a complete winter.
Sat behind me now is Gym Goer, a young, bearded Portuguese male who seems to think it’s okay to come here from the gym and forego the shower until they get home. Mind you, his gym-BO would’ve been an effective counter to the earlier devilish smell that was haunting the café.
I’ve got a couple of errands to run before getting home, so I pop into the gents quickly and there I see the damning evidence that the sulphurous stink of earlier was what most of us were probably thinking it was. I hate it when people do that in a café. I’d DNA-test that and track down the culprit, wheeling them back in tomorrow morning to make a formal apology to everyone. They didn’t even hang around to flush properly. Why do people think it’s acceptable to leave public loos in this state? You wouldn’t do that at home.
Twitter: @1607WestEgg
FB: @DRTcomedy
Instagram: @1607westegg
TikTok: @1607WestEgg