The weekend was a non-event for me. The week had been a long and wearing one and three stand-up gigs, physically, tends to be about my limit these days. The long journeys, the usual getting lost on the way business, and the getting back late, all add to the general tiredness I’m feeling by the time Friday comes along.
There had been a chance to gig yesterday afternoon, but there was no actual confirmation I was on the bill. Just a message to turn up, sign up for the gig (it was an early evening one) and that would be it. I guess that’s the level of admin some youngsters think suffices these days. That doesn’t work for me though.
Firstly, location-wise, it was somewhere north of the river I’ve never been to knowingly and without a confirmed slot, I wasn’t turning up. Secondly, I like to see some evidence that a bill has been properly curated, and I didn’t see that. I saw a couple of comics included on the message who I just don’t rate. I see no improvement in their performances, which might sound harsh, but I see this as a job, and sharing a stage with this poor calibre of comics undermines my confidence. I find myself questioning whether the promoter has done their homework. Have they actually seen videos of these bad comics, and if they have, maybe they think I’m at the same level as these comics I don’t rate? I don’t believe that’s the case. I’m pretty bad at a lot of stuff. Reading maps, working in an office (you wouldn’t want to employ me), big social occasions such as weddings (I hate these). There are all sorts of things. And these bad comics will excel in areas I’m no good at. But they don’t belong on a stage. If they did, I’d have seen evidence of it by now. I do. Somehow, probably because of where I am in my life, something has finally clicked with my stand-up and I’m making big progress. I don’t want to jeopardise my confidence slogging my way through a level I’ve already progressed from.
Seeing the potential bill, I made the quick decision I’d stay home and continue to rest. These days, I am better at switching off, but if I don’t find something to do at the weekends, it usually means I’m napping my way through the days. While I’m a terrible sleeper, the afternoon nap, which I think is a colossal waste of a day, always sends me into a deep slumber. And then the weird and sometimes awful dreams come.
Thankfully, this weekend, dream-wise, it was largely the former. On Saturday afternoon, I dreamt about Gareth Bale and his new MLS adventure. The Welshman, whose exploits in Madrid, while there were big highs, is a player I’ve never quite bought into. He’s been a good player but not a great one. These days he’s hailed as the greatest Welsh footballer for decades. Again, I don’t buy into that.
The last few years I’ve found myself aghast at Bale’s severe top knot hairstyle, severely pulled back with the knot covering a huge bald spot that was first evident at Euro 2016. The player has stuck with the same hairstyle since then. There’s no shame in white guys going bald these days. We might never pull off the look as well as our black counterparts, but ever since the Mitchell brothers rolled up in Eastenders in early 1990 with their shaven pates (when it was still a half decent show), the combover was on borrowed time. Of course, some guys don’t have the right skull for the shaven head look. If I were to bald, I’m not sure I could pull it off but I know I wouldn’t waste time pushing the hair about, adjusting the parting to take into account the hair loss. The hair would be clipped off and I’d just have to put up with any skull-related ridicule.
Bale and many make serious problems for their future hairline with the top knot. It usually involves pulling the hair back tighter than the admittedly bog-standard pony tail and increases the chances of Traction Alopecia. I see the hairline of some young guys walking around with the man bun and you can already see clear evidence of receding. But you know, when we’re young, who among us ever listened to the advice of older people?
The second dream, this morning, involved a female Siamese Twin, although the dream afforded me a front and back view of the twin and there was no sign of the twin. There was though a disembodied voice coming from the back of the ‘twin’ communicating with their sister.
There was also an interim dream, a sadder one in keeping with the dreams I seem to recall most these days, triggered by the recent loss a friend, the sibling of one of my oldest friends. My life was very much better for knowing this person for the best part of three decades, and the sense of loss here has been two-fold. Sadness for myself, that I have lost someone I’d long regarded as a friend, and who was always kind and generous with their time, but more so, a deep sadness for her family who’ve been in my life since I was 17. It’s one thing losing parents. That’s part of the natural order of things. To start losing siblings, in this case, still too early, it shows as my recently bereaved friend once said to me, that “we’re running out of road”. This is going to be the next stage now. Losing the people, we’ve grown up with. Mentally, that’s a hell of an adjustment.
I have lost a couple of old friends young, long before their time, to serious illnesses, and maybe you too have experienced this. I don’t know about you, but I knew this wasn’t the norm and while it was difficult to process these losses, it didn’t necessarily make me think, “This is where I’m at now.” Of course, it made me see that we never know what’s around the corner. Might we be as unlucky as these poor souls whose lives were cut ridiculously short? But I knew their losses weren’t normal. They’d gone well before their time.
In this instance though, the deceased, while also gone before their time, and while it’s been such a shock that they’ve passed, that ‘time’, if not now, is almost upon my generation. Most of us have lost our parents or one half of them now, but those with siblings who’ve got a few years on them, maybe they can see that day coming now.
I’m rambling. And it’s all slightly maudlin. The dream itself though featured a visit to my grieving friend in his old family home, and also featured a cast of the already deceased, including my own parents. It was slightly gloomy, as you can imagine, though the detail my dream state was able to recall as my dream alter-ego made their way through my friend’s old family home where he’d lived for thirty years, was impressive and also comforting as I loved that house. It was a brilliant home. Four bedrooms. A yellow-brick council house back in the days when you could get council houses, rather than flats, on a block my dad had helped to decorate in SW8 when the estate was built in the late seventies. Just across the road from my beloved café, I even lived in this house for 9 months from 2009 to early 2010, though by then the house was somewhat rundown and it was a bit like joining a TV show when all the leading lights had left and the series was due to be cancelled by the network at the end of its current run.
So, after a weekend of napping and loads of reading, I woke up this morning again troubled by my back. I sprayed some cold gel spray on it, but the aching is so pronounced this morning, I had to try and stretch the pain out. I only mildly succeeded, but I need to get back into the habit of stretching in the mornings. I don’t travel light, packing my laptop, work and books to walk to the café four mornings a week. That, I’m sure, plays a part in the ongoing back travails.
I’m hoping this morning I can get some work done without Morocco jumping on my table and raconteuring with me for an hour. As nice as it is to talk with people, I still need to work and my time in the café is precious given that I just can’t seem to work at home.
The week ahead involves three gigs, the first of which is tomorrow and for which I’ll rehearse tomorrow afternoon. This morning I hope to continue working on the new set which I’ve really been slow to do.
In my latest Nectar Points Update, after Friday night’s Clapham gig, together with a couple of friends who came along to the show, I made my first trek to Clapham’s Sainsbury’s store since last year’s scratch card kerfuffle when I had to take my aunt there, documented in the now-deceased podcast.
In previous lives, this store was a go-karting centre, and prior to that, a bus garage. These days of course, Clapham is essentially a night-time economy and the template for all the other wannabe gentrifiers such as Brixton, to follow. Unless you need to go to Sainsbury’s, the Hight Street is no longer somewhere you do your shopping. Until 2000, this was a high street which if anything had too many shoe shops, two pet shops including one which was tucked in at the back of its brilliant and much-missed Clapham market.
My friends, a husband and wife, agreed with me where to meet inside the store after we’d both done our respective shopping. I told one of my friends, the wife, that I had a few bits and pieces to get, including a replacement bath sponge. I didn’t want her running into me in the bathroom aisle wondering what on earth I was doing and I have no idea how bath sponges are perceived by others. Are they fashionable or not? What does it say about me that I use one? I preferred to ‘own up to it’ so it wasn’t something her and her husband felt they needed to discuss after they dropped me off home.
I bought the usual Halls Sugar Free lozenges, now thankfully an addiction under control. Two cartons of Long Life milk, up 10p to 75p a carton. The sponge itself had gone up at least 10p in price. I had an opening balance of 122 Nectar Points and accrued a miserly 3 on a total spend of £3.45, meaning my closing balance is 125 points, worth 62p.
That’s 8p short of a bath sponge.
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