Having To Look After My Own Kids!

Warming Up Catch Up.

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Just looking back at that "I Killed Rasputin" poster from the last blog. That "You'll Believe A Monk Can't Die!" tagline is so good. It's a funny joke, but also the ridiculousness of the accepted story of Rasputin's death is central to the play. With that and the duck tear joke, maybe I am not so bad at this after all. Two good jokes in eleven years. I should carry on with this.

I am quite a fan of the afternoon gig, especially if the gig is within one hour's drive of my house. You don't have to stay up late, you can get other stuff done in the day and if you're in the audience you can probably get away without a babysitter - your kids can go on a playdate (or if you're bold and don't mind hearing a man call Basil Brush a cunt) then you can bring older kids along with you.

I certainly felt good about it after this lunchtime gig in Chesham, though I hadn't been quite enthusiastic when I had to leave my own family behind on a Saturday morning. Why had I agreed to this? To be fair I feel about most things like this and then I do them and usually end up enjoying myself. I am exactly the same as my 7 year old son in this respect.

The Chesham festival turned out to be lovely and the people running it all very enthusiastic and excited. I was talking to Esther Manito, who I've never met before, but who I had heard great things about. I'd watched a couple of her specials and knew she had the kind of attitude and chops that would make for a good RHLSTP and I was right. It's quite a tough gig for a newer comedian, when the audience might not have heard of you, but she had them on side from the start and we had a lot of fun.

A live RHLSTP is a different beast to the studio ones that I've been doing recently and it's great to play off the crowd for laughs. The future of this long running project is not certain, but I think a mixture of studio and live ones will probably be the way forward. I might do fewer podcasts. Or I might do more. I guess it depends on whether anyone gives me any actual work.

I was listening to Adam Buxton's fantastic (both in content and even more so in production) audiobook on the way home and he is a writer/performer plagued by self-doubt. Similar to me in many ways, but probably more so overall. He is extremely funny and way more talented than me (though I would say that, due to the old self-doubt, but he is) and absolutely shouldn't be so crushed by self-criticism. It does seem that people with utter self-confidence (or who at least seem to have it) do do better, especially in our job. Yet those people seem more detached from the human condition (which for most of us is surely being plagued by our own uselessness, stupidity and kept awake at night by our many mistakes) and in the long run that honesty and humility and the fact that we empathise with him, maybe make Adam the greater artist. And his vulnerability is what elevates him beyond the run of the mill idiots trying to do podcasts and comedy. I have no vulnerability. I am simply too strong.

Of course most of us, unlike Adam feel like useless cunts because we are useless cunts. So that's no consolation.

I got home and took over childcare duties, taking the kids to the supermarket so we could get the ingredients to make a lemon meringue pie, that Phoebe was very keen to have a go at. We got as far as making the pastry and putting it in the fridge before we ran out of time. I made dinner and it already seemed impossible that this was the same day as I'd actually done a gig. In a good way though.

I put Ernie to bed and fell asleep on his bottom bunk at 8.30pm. So daytime gigging means you avoid the adrenaline keeping you awake til the small hours, but also knocks you out (may only be true for 57+ year olds).

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Making up for all that time away from home by doing as much as possible with the kids. Can I go back on tour now? I am joking. It's been fun. Mainly fun.

Phoebe and me had time to finish the lemon meringue pie today and as always I was struck by the magic of cooking. Somehow the spell book worked and combining all the ingredients turned them into something very different than they'd been before. Why did people waste time trying to turn lead into gold when the real alchemy was turning egg yolks, flour, butter and lemon juice into the lemon bit of a lemon meringue pie? Much more miraculous and twice as delicious as gold.

I messed up the meringue by misreading the recipe and adding the sugar and flour too soon. You have to follow the spell exactly or it won't work. My egg whites weren't turning into soft peaks. I rang my mum who is the meringue expert, but I had gone so far wrong she couldn't even imagine the disaster. So I started again and did it properly and BANG, perfick meringue foam.

We stuck it in the oven and it came out looking almost like the picture. I don't even really like lemon meringue pie (I much prefer gold -why did I waste my morning) but I loved ours. It was a total triumph for dad and daughter. If you ignore all the eggs I'd wasted. But some ruined egg whites meant nothing. Our souls had bonded - we'd remember this pie for the rest of our lives or until we were a teenager and other things seemed more important. Still worth it.

We all went out for a Sunday roast and played hangman and Wordle and Ernie insisted on telling the waiting staff a poorly read joke from his new "Jokes for kids of all ages" book. If he does that it's charming, yet if I did it it would look weird and creepy. It's one rule for kids and quite another for old men.

Out of this book we've got a new game where we have to make up Doctor Doctor jokes based on an improvised premise. "Doctor Doctor, I think I'm a table.... Well that's lucky, I needed to put my cup of tea somewhere" and others that didn't work quite as well as even that. It's all part of the training to turn my kids into super comedians so they can win all the big comedy awards and say "That's for my dad. You should have seen his genius. But now it's too late." Though would an hour of Doctor Doctor jokes that don't quite work win the big comedy prize at the Fringe?

Of course they fucking would. It's exactly the kind of shit that awards panels love. I might do it myself.

And then in the afternoon Phoebe had a play date, so I dragged a reluctant Ernie to Luton to Woodside Animal Farm. As always, he'd said he didn't want to go, but once he got there he had the time of his life. Ernie is obsessed with snakes and after we'd been shown some guinea pigs and chicks and a rabbit, we asked if we could see the snake and Ben, the animal wrangler went to get Tarzan the python (and kudos for not calling him Monty). The kids were only allowed to stroke it, but adults could hold it. I declined. One of the mums was braver than me and Ernie said "You're so lucky being a grown up". Though being allowed to hold snakes is probably one of the only actual benefits and that's a negative for me.

It was a full and exhausting day, but exactly the kind of thing that I felt I was missing when stuck in a hotel in Wolverhampton trying to fight off this stupid bug (which is more or less better now, but still hanging on around the edges like an unwanted party guest).

Family, it turns out, is more important than work. Someone should write a film about that.

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More having to look after my own kids today. Catie had a preview for her new Edinburgh show tonight (book tickets NOW) so was prepping for that most of the day, though I did manage to get in an 8am game of tennis, which obviously just knackered me out for the rest of the day.

We did more baking - this time making ginger biscuits, my favourite type of biscuit and biscuits are one of my favourite things (back in an early 2000s Fringe I warned my flatmates to keep me away from actresses and biscuits which pretty much sums up my sad life). I should have been put off ginger biscuits today when I realised that they are made principally of sugar, syrup and butter (somehow I'd felt like they were a healthy option up against other cakes and sweet things, but ginger is a very minor ingredient), but making very nice ginger biscuits at home and seeing how easy it was, just made me think that that's all I am going to do from now on. So that's my life over.

We’d eaten the good ones before I could take a photo - these are the dried up runts of the batch! Still nice though.

Phoebe thinks we should set up a cafe together and aside from the fact that I would eat all the produce and die in two years I think it's a good idea. With her artistic and baking skill and my liking eating biscuits, I think we could be the perfect team.

The rest of the day was trying to forge a delicate balance between fulfilling my fatherly duties, keeping the kids alive and not falling asleep. We went for pizza, watched the Minecraft Movie, tried to learn French and Italian, played our own made up wordles, did some Doctor Doctor jokes, walked the dog, played in the splash park.... Somehow I didn't fall asleep (though nearly during Minecraft). The thing with kids is they manage to pack a lot of stuff into one day. At one point I looked at my watch and couldn't believe it was still four hours to bed time.

The kids bedtime was also my bedtime again tonight and Catie got to stay out with her comedy pals and enjoy her gig. It's good that we both get to do work and the really hard work of parenting. And dads who don't do this stuff are really missing out. On biscuits mainly.

Retro RHLSTP with Terry Christian now up on audio.

And as a FULL, FREE video on youtube.

Here’s a clip