Directions from a Grave Stone

Warming Up

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Jon Joosta on Substack asked an interesting question the other day “Is Ally the oldest dummy (vent) still at work?” Both they and I have Googled it and can’t find any older dummy still working. I thought about asking the Guinness Book of Records, but it costs five pounds and I am not that interested!

If you know of an older vent dummy that is still working on this planet (or elsewhere in the Universe) then let me know.

He will be delighted to find out he’s a record breaker, but I am keeping it as a secret from him for now, just in case there’s someone else with a mad old dummy out there. I am not saying Ally is mad. I am saying he is mad old.

I can tell you one of the good things about not drinking alcohol (my run of not drinking continued for today at least) is that I didn’t have a hangover this morning, like you did, you fucking idiot, though I ate too many sausage rolls at the party I went to and had a dodgy stomach, so no one escapes.

Ten tips for New Year's Resolutions!

I promised you some New Year’s Resolutions, but the wise man, Richard Wiseman (not everyone who calls themself a Wise Man is an idiot) suggests in his Substack that you’re better off doing one resolution and making it something you’ve not done before and that is a bit unusual unusual.

And whilst I am secretly resolving to make this the year that I fit back into my wedding suit (or die trying) (or rip my wedding suit trying), my one unusual resolution comes from the lesson that 2025 taught me.

Yes younger readers, even at the age of 58 you are still learning. Annoyingly you’re learning more and more. And most of the things you learn would have been useful to know when you were young. It’s one of life’s great tricks. You become a wise man or woman or person, not when you haphazardly follow a star for no really good reason, but when your wisdom in largely useless to you.

Also young people are programmed not to listen to old people, so there’s no way you can pass it on and prevent others from making the same mistakes you did.

There has to be a God. Nature could not have come up with such a good joke on its own. The twist is that God hates us, is laughing at us and wants us to fail. Which in itself is another good joke. I am all for believing that Universes can appear from nowhere, but there’s no way jokes can. We haven’t even got to my resolution yet and I’ve already proven the existence of God. And most of you just read this for free.

My one resolution is less tongue-in-cheek than the ones I made last year and it comes from something I learned about myself during the secret project that I still can’t even talk about from November. It revolved around the kind of creativity that I have always assumed that I was absolutely hopeless at and so would never attempt, which is pretty much any creativity rather than writing and (that highest form of art and intelligence) doing jokes. I started with the absolute confidence that everything I did would be awful, embarrassing and a failure.

As it turned out, (spoiler alert) I was, in my own way, adept, given that I had never done anything like it before. I was actually (and this has been said of me before) reasonably adequate and furthermore (also not said for the first time) quite good. Was I winner good? You’ll have to wait to find out. But I surpassed my own expectations by so much that I felt like a winner even in the unlikely event that I wasn’t a winner.

I wasn’t being modest when I said I thought I’d be terrible. I genuinely believed I would be. Even though, in life, I have proven to be surprisingly adequate at most things I still have very low opinions of myself. Interspersed with ridiculous confidence in myself. Including in the actual job I have done for nearly 40 years. Despite having done well enough, I tend to side with the trolls who think I have somehow been lucky or managed to constantly work in this competitive industry without being funny at all. Interspersed with thinking I am the greatest comedian ever. The truth may be somewhere between those two extremes

This is a complex area and I suppose much of my actual work has been an attempt to understand myself - and I haven’t really succeeded. Some of the self-doubt is undoubtedly self-protective (if I never try then I cannot fail) and some of it comes from an attempt to be realistic and not turn into one of those insane middle-aged men who refuse to believe they are not the greatest at everything. Some of it comes from the undoubted comedic truth that being self-derogatory is funny and why punch up or down when you can just punch yourself in the face.

As I said this is a complex idea to express and digging down into oneself with any honesty is one of the hardest things to do, which is why so many people just assume they’re right about everything and don’t even excavate a teaspoon-worth of their soul.

As a school kid I realised that being clever or claiming to be was a bad thing (though if you were good at sports you could show off and no one could say a thing), so I pretended to be more stupid than I really was (except in exam situations).

I have carried on pretending to be more stupid than I am. To such an extent that I think I might actually have become more stupid. Certainly to the extent that many people take my stupidity at face value (and are now right to do so, because I have become

The point I am trying and ironically failing to make (or it’s at least ironic that I am saying I am failing) is that modesty, false or realistic, is OK and mocking yourself is funny. But people will think you are what you tell them you are. I have seen people I know to be thick convincing the world they are clever, just by saying that they are. I am called the King of Edinburgh solely because I called myself that.

No one has the time to work out the hidden meaning behind your modesty/hang ups.

Which is a long way of saying that my new year’s resolution is to attempt to be more positive about myself. Not in a Trumpy/most comedians way, but in a realistic way. I am going to be more prepared to try things that I think I can’t do (without having really tried) and I am going to be more positive about the things I know that I am actually good at.

It’s going to make for some (more) interminable blogs (there I go again, breaking my resolution), but it will be interesting to see how it affects my life. Also it’s woolly enough that I can probably say I’ve achieved it, come 2027.

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I came across this grave in Hitchin Cemetery this lunchtime. It’s Margaret Callander Todd who died at Alma Villa, Old Park Road, Hitchin on 28th March 1876. I was so distracted by the unusual detail of the address that I didn’t notice until now that she was only 16 months old. Sadly the cemetery has many graves to babies and toddlers, especially of course from the time before vaccines and modern medicine.

I had never seen a grave with an address on. As you may know from my stand up I feel gravestones do miss out a lot of info about the person buried there. Usually just their name, dates and maybe one bit of vague info about how good a person they were.

I like this gravestone as it attempts to give more info than usual, though only about the people involved deaths and not their lives, which seems a waste of words. Though interesting to know that Thomas (presumably Margaret’s brother) was killed by a fall from his horse at Grahamstown, South Africa in 1891 (it also lets us know where his body is - if anyone in Grahamstown wants to go and have a look). It gives a glimpse into his life, his travels, his love of horse-riding (or maybe it was his first go).

If you’re going to pay for that many words then maybe give us some info about his life, not his death, but I don’t want to criticise the Todds who lost three children at the ages of 36,25 and 1.

It made me decide to celebrate my life, rather than the tragic and bizarre way I am going to die, on my gravestone. Which will just read richardherring.com/warmingup so people can go and read all about what I did and thought, rather than just my dates, birth and death weights and how much I loved Jesus. I will have to leave some money to keep my website going after my death. And it relies on the internet still being a thing in the coming centuries. It will at least be fun for people to look at and find out that the internet was once a thing. And laugh at me for thinking they’d still be able to look me up. The joke’s on them because I knew the truth.

Anyway, I looked up Old Park Road on my phone and it was only 15 minutes walk away, so I decided to go and find Alma Villa, if it was still there, to see where Margaret died. I was thinking she would have been an old woman. I don’t know if seeking out the house of a dead child is any less creepy than seeking out the house of a dead old woman, but in my mind I was doing the latter. It felt like the Universe had given me an address for a reason. I didn’t know anything else about Margaret. I could at least see where she lived.

It did extend my lunchtime walk. I fancied I was heading for the old bit of town that is largely still intact, but actually I was going beyond that, past the roundabout next to the library and the road I was heading to was home to Waitrose. I realised there was a good chance that Alma Villa was gone. Maybe it was situated in the vegetable aisle of the supermarket.

Alma Villa might also have been renamed and though a few houses from that time survive, there are several newer buildings, including a complex called the Old Bakery, where I imagined Margaret had probably bought some bread (obviously that is now fanciful, but maybe her mum did). None of the older houses were called Alma Villas and a search of that address online only brought up the grave I’d found and a reference to a meeting where a later resident iof the house had attended.

It was slightly disappointing, but I enjoyed letting chance and fate take control of my life for half an hour. Of course had I been run over on the roundabout and been able to tell the paramedics what I was doing before I passed, then my grave could have read, “who died searching for Alma Villa, Old Park Road, Hitchin, which did not even exist.”

I looked up some old maps when I got home and it was interesting to see how few homes there were in Hitchin in the 1800s. It looks like there was no home on the site of Waitrose back then, but it doesn’t say which house on the road is Alma Villa. I suspect it would be possible to find out somewhere, but even though I was on a fool’s errand trying to find the building where (unbeknownst to me) a baby had died, I still liked the fact that I’d allowed a chance encounter with a grave alter my day and thus my whole life. It meant my dog walk lasted for over an hour, which made me slightly fitter, so the deaths of the Todds had possibly extended my life very slightly.

And it shows that by including some unusual info on your gravestone, you can influence the lives of people 150 years in the future. That gravestone has now very slightly influenced your life too, because you’ve wasted valuable minutes reading it (and some of you will now go and try and find out more details).