Criminal Ball, Taunting Brain

Warming Up

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We’re going to Somerset for Christmas week and there’s only so much room in the car so we exchanged our non-Santa presents this evening. I don’t know why Santa can’t deliver all the presents, especially the bigger ones, as he has infinite room on his sleigh, but the mean old git is only taking a certain amount to the Air B n B we’re staying in.

I guess he’s annoyed that we are asking him deliver to a different address this year. And we’d already messed him around by moving house last year. Look mate, if you don’t want to deal with the admin then don’t take the job.

Anyway it’s quite nice to spread the present getting over a few days and it was only a few toys and grown up presents tonight. And again Santa has a weird cut off where he stops giving presents to people once they classify as adults. I think I was 18 the last time he filled my pillow case with stuff. I put the pillowcase every year but nothing. It’s a harsh lesson about you being on your own once you’ve left home. After all the whisky and mince pies I’ve given to that bloke.

Phoebe was very excited about the present she was giving me, as she’d made it herself. It turned out to be a mock up of an identity parade, like in the Usual Suspects or the best cold opening of all time from Brooklyn 99

Watch that as many times as you like and you will still laugh every time.

But my line up wasn’t of humans it was three different balls and the ID parade was to try and identify the evil ball that had tried to kill me.

Of course I loved it on every level. It turns out that it is genuinely better when your kid has made you a present themself. She had taken the time to make this, source different balls and keep it hidden from me. Plus she looked so happy with her joke and happy that I clearly found it funny and charming too. Again, she’s got a lovely left field sense of comedy - a bollock identity parade isn’t route 1, but also is very adept at artistic projects and it’s a lovely looking object even if you don’t get the potentially edgy and sick humour behind it.

Nearly five years ago I got that shaky phone call from my GP and thought I might not see any more Christmases or my kids grow up. But now it’s our fifth Christmas as a monoball and I have a decent shot at seeing a few more and I have an almost 11 year old who is happy to satirise my cancer and call me a testicle Cyclops and make beautiful, funny art about a horrible thing that we all went through.

That’s better than anything Father Christmas could come up with. That guy has so little imagination that he needs a fucking list to help him. Come up with your own ideas mate. I had no idea that I wanted a testicle police line up, but now I’ve got it I couldn’t be happier.

Lovely to see people starting to receive their Can I Have My Ball Back? kickstarter rewards too.

My daughter isn’t the only person who can turn testicular cancer into high art. Or in my case, so pants.

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You probably don’t know because I don’t like to talk about it, but as well as only having one testicle, I have no visual imagination (or as it is known by some who want to make my life sound like an old school Disney film, aphantasia). Still no parking badge. How much do you need not to have before you are classified as disabled. I am physically and mentally challenged and need to park near the shops in case I forget how to make my way from the car to Waitrose.

I had a dream last night in which I thought I had conquered my aphantasia. I had wonderful colourful images spreading out in my mind. I’d done it. I could finally see things in my head like a regular little boy. The colours, the images- it was all so vivid and wonderful.

This was a cruel trick for my brain to play on me. I am able to see images in my dreams (some aphantasiacs cannot), so my dreams can show me what it would be like if I could imagine images when I was awake, all the time knowing that I can’t. I was so full of gratitude and wonder and so annoyed when I woke up and then later realised that none of it had happened. My waking brain was a giving me nothing by a dark grey blackness, even though my taunting sleeping brain can see every colour of the rainbow and any fucked up image it cares to dream up.

It really suggests that there’s a literal switch in my brain that if I could only just find it I could turn this thing on permanently. If I can see images when I am asleep, why not when I am awake? It makes zero sense.

Here’s what you could have won... the motorboat of my dreams has sunk into unfathomable depths when I awake. What a mother fucker my brain is.

I don’t mind it dreaming, but to make me dream that I can imagine stuff out of my dreams is just the utmost cruelty that suggests a very real severance between waking and sleeping me.

A Christmas party at my manager’s house tonight. Some big comedy stars were pointing out that their hard work had paid for this place. I pointed out that my hard work had maybe paid for the side table that the cheese was on. We all have our place in the firmament.

It turns out that getting 15% of loads of people’s earnings is better than getting 85% of just yours. Especially if you are me.

But I might have a swimming pool in my basement. I just haven’t looked. So who is best?

Ben Evans (not that one) has put together another fun Emergency Questions compilation, this one in which comedians and celebs tell me what they’d morph into if they could go into a chrysalis and come out as anything that they wished (one of my favourite questions).