Curing Cancer with Coconut Sugar

Warming Up catch up

Hi, welcome to a moving weekend Warming Up catch up. But whilst I have your attention - RHLSTP is back doing live records and you, the live audience are such an important part of it. Thanks to everyone who came last night to see a fantastic sold out evening with Adrian Edmondson and Michael Sheen. Sales are quite low for the remaining gigs and I know you’re waiting to find out who’s on, but these records are always fab, so take a punt if you can (and obviously I am not expecting people to travel miles to see these). Next week, October 7th the guests are Fern Brady and Doon Mackichan and it would be a crying shame if this doesn’t have a big crowd as these two will be incredible. Book tickets here. And don’t forget that there’s a gig coming up in Birmingham too (and one in Leicester). Full details here.

Occasionally someone will complain on social media that I never have women on the show (it’s completely untrue - there’s been something like 35 women on RHLSTP this year so far and this is only week 40, so not 50/50 as there’s two pods a week, but not far off) BUT you if you’re moaning about represntation then you have to do your bit too! Buy a ticket!

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However stressful moving house will be, it can't be as bad as moving into our last place 7 years ago. The house wasn't ready, we had a new baby, we had a new puppy and the house was intent on haunting and killing us. So even though it's non-stop box-popping and mild disputes over where the party cups should be stored, we are not being poisoned by carbon monoxide and we have heating, water, plumbing - just no internet (though I've hooked into one of those public EE ones, which is adequate, if slow and I can only access it while sitting on the toilet).

We enjoyed the high life of being child free for the morning by going out for breakfast. I have eaten out for all meals in the last two or three days and have noticeably put on weight. This house may make me happy, but it may kill me.

Not having the internet does slow down settling into a modern home. Everything wants to connect to the wifi. Even my Hive thermostat, which at least allows me to control it without a router, has no way of changing the time and date without the internet doing it for it.

After a brief return to the old house to take back some stuff we didn't need and pick up stuff that we'd forgotten (feeling a bit like Robinson Crusoe returning to his shipwreck for supplies), we picked up Phoebe, but Ernie wanted to stay with his grandparents, which was lucky as he would have been a nightmare to have around in a house full of boxes and dangerous new stuff to mess around with. We took Phoebe out for dinner, though most things were booked. We got a table at the Glasshouse, which turned out to be an incredibly rowdy pub populated by raucous drunk people in their twenties, even at 6.30pm. We'd had to pay £15 to secure the booking - I'd assumed because it was a good restaurant, but I suspect actually because its clientele is so drunk that they aren't guaranteed to show. Phoebe was scared and I was worried about the terrible things she might see, so we went to Pizza Express and the manager kindly refunded our money.

There's a window where that kind of pub is fun and it's somewhere between being 9 and 57. I can't say exactly where. I haven't drunk for nearly four years and a sip of champagne aside, Phoebe's managed 9 years sober. One day she'll want to be in a place like this. Thankfully I never shall.

Pizza Express was less raucous and the only incident was a small 6 year old boy walking up to our table, staring at us intensely and then walking away. He turned out to be podcaster/broadcaster Olly Mann's son.

Phoebe wasn't phased by the new bedroom and fell asleep pretty easily. Catie and me also feel very much at home very quickly. There's much to do and it's as knackering and boring as you'd expect. One day we'll be unpacked and know where we put the colander. But not today.

Having to catch up on these blogs late due to internet and busyness and I have to say that the whole weekend feels like one long, long, day.

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How quickly they forget. I was in Holland and Barratt buying some nuts and the young woman behind the counter asked if I had a loyalty card. I did, but didn't have it with me, so she asked me for my post code. The card is, of course registered to my old house, the house I was living in two days ago. I got the postcode wrong (mixing up the postcodes of my last two houses) and I COULDN'T REMEMBER THE CORRECT POST CODE. The one from two days ago. That's some brutal moving on, right there.

The last seven years never happened. Bad news for my son who is seven on Saturday,

I worked hard on the kitchen today (as did Catie and Phoebe, but I put in an early and a late shift) and by the end of the day it was almost finished. We had Ernie back with us by night time and were able to eat around the kitchen table. Ernie too, has settled in fast. His bedroom is down an L shaped corridor from our room (he was next door before) and Catie did some prep runs for him in case he got scared in the night. Phoebe helpfully jumped out at him saying she was going to kill him during these. Not very helpful but I laughed out loud when I was told about this.

We went back to the old house to tidy up a bit and retrieve more booty. We still haven't sold it and no one has even been round to look at it for months (it was off the market for a while), but I'd noticed that the cat had been sick under one of the guest room beds at some point in the last seven years, but the sick was only now visible that the bed was gone. So we thought we should clear that up, remembering how off-putting it had been to see a lump of human shit on a toilet seat in one of the houses we looked at. It's important not to put off prospective buyers with bodily waste.

It was very much a lite move that we did on Friday. There is so much more to either bring or dispose of, but we made two trips (the second time with both cars so that we could pick up Ernie after) and got a fair amount out of the sinking ship.

At home we decided that it might be best to dump the contents of some of the jars of sugar and flour that we were pretty sure had sat on our shelves in the previous kitchen for seven years largely untroubled. Stuff like gluten free self-raising flour and various dark sugars and unusual spices. I put them all together in a bin bag and considered that no one had ever mixed such a strange combination of ingredients in these exact quantities and wondered if I might accidentally create a cure for cancer or something that would give anyone who ate it super powers. I'd never be able to recreate it if so, so I hoped it would just be a benign collection of out of date mainly powdered food stuffs.

Catie and me disagree quite strongly about self-by dates - she thinks that food will go off at one second after midnight the day after the packet recommends and I strongly feel that you can eat anything that doesn't have mould or maggots in it. Sure, occasionally I am violently ill as a result, but no food is wasted. Unless you count regurgitated food. But I let her win this round and we will start anew and probably never buy any more coconut sugar or 10 packets of long grain rice in one go, when we eat rice about once a month at most (I am not sure that was even a Covid thing as it went out of date in 2021).

There were spices in the spice draw that I probably bought when I lived in Balham (left there in 2003) and I wouldn't be surprised if something had survived from the stuff my mum gave me when I left home in 1986. I certainly recognise a few kitchen implements that have been with me that  long, including a cheese grater that is probably 50 years old, but still grates fine and (as James Acaster has pointed out) the other three sides are pretty much pristine and unused). Certainly the plate that I liberated from University with my college crest on it was purloined in 1986 and was probably pretty old then as it had been relegated to a shared kitchen.

What I am saying is it's weird to touch every single thing that you have in your kitchen in one weekend. And realise that for many things it's the first time you've touched them since you've bought them. I rarely if ever have poached eggs at home, but for some reason had at least five devices designed to give you the perfect poached egg that I HAVE NEVER TRIED OUT! Well I did have. Now they're in a box to go to charity for someone else to buy, put in a drawer and NEVER USE.

Those egg poachers will probably survive way longer than anyone who is alive today and yet never fulfil their purpose of poaching an egg. I don't know whether to feel sad for them or happy. Is that a life well lived or a waste of existence or should I stop giving inanimate objects the power of thought and emotion.

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The ghost may have followed us to the new house. The boiler stopped working this morning and it's up in an alcove in the attic. I hadn't been able to work out how to get the ladder down, but needs must and I finally managed to hook it. As I did I nearly took a step backwards and fell down the stairs, which would have been a good start (and end) to my stay here. I reset the boiler which had a familiar F23 fault that I will probably have to get someone out to look at. I also found out how to turn on the bathroom fan once I was up there, so solving problems!

I couldn't, however, get the ladder back up again and cut my fingers six times as it fell back on me, before giving in and leaving it down. That's just how we're going to live now.

I tried to clear my office space a bit and in the process found the box of videos that includes at least some episodes of Festival of Fun, so I might be able to upload that Moon Zappa interview at some point. I did manage to find a bit of our Festival of Fun stuff online and watched a few minutes. I am much more handsome than I remember being (the beard maybe got a bit more awful in Edinburgh) or at least intriguing looking. And I was surprised by how cocky and rude we were about other comedians. We were arrogant and yet self-derogatory so almost got away with it. In the Leah Thompson interview we are visibly annoyed at being messed around when we've been working so hard (ah poor little Rich and Stew having to do five days of slightly exhausting work whilst getting drunk and getting propositioned), but you can see how much Leah enjoys our interview technique and I am seemingly unphased by being in the presence of such a big star. Not everything in this hastily produced show stands up (though more so than most shows of this vintage) but I found myself laughing a lot at our bits. There's a chance that this was peak Lee and Herring - the rawness and silliness and hysteria heightened by the circumstances and less over rehearsed than Fist of Fun, where I just remember us doing so many retakes that it was hard to keep up the energy for us or the audience.

You can watch the Leah Thompson interview and some of the links here

And find the other clips pretty easily too.

Anyway, I am keen to watch the rest so will get someone to convert them from video to digital at some point. Maybe as a secret bonus for badgers and plussers and substack paid subs!

I was unsurprisingly pretty knackered today and had work to do with a RHLSTP show. Timing could have been better for the move, but we'd anticipated moving in mid-August so it wasn't really my fault and it still wasn't as bad as having a new baby and puppy.

And what a tonic RHLSTP was. Two absolutely top guests and a sold out theatre (sales are pretty low for the rest of the run as you wankers goal hang for the biggest celebs, but hopefully they will pick up). Adrian Edmondson was an absolute delight. He's been reticent to appear on this over the years and I thought he might be nervous or tricky, but he's found a real peace within himself and was so relaxed and happy and funny. It was great to be able to thank him for they Young Ones after failing to do the same with Rick. Rick Mayall had been my teenage hero, but watching the Young Ones again I've realised how Ade was the best thing in it - so committed and berserk and funny. Do read his book - it's an incredible piece of work.

So what a relief that another of my heroes was so great (he even sang a bit of Keith Marshall and his musical anarchy).

And so lovely to see Michael Sheen again who I also love and am in awe of. He's so down to earth and kind and is at home talking passionately about politics as he is with indulging me talking about my cold, hairy penis.

I was worried about staying awake on the drive home, which was exacerbated by being stuck at the Q Park exit for 10 minutes as the car in front of me failed to exit and the A1 being shut again. But I didn't go to the wrong house. And when I got home it felt like home.

If you think I’m reading all that out for paid subs then you’re off your fucking nut! No proper internet til Thursday when hopefully normal service will resume.