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Embarrassing when you turn up at a party and someone else is wearing the same outfit.
Last night had been the book launch for my incredibly talented wife Catherine Wilkins. Buy Cafe Chaos for any kids you know who love funny books! She had organised it on what she assumed was a day off, but as I was going to Glasgow today, yesterday had supposedly been a travel day. Obviously my family comes first, so Bollings drove the car to Scotland yesterday and I took the train to Glasgow today. The kids couldn't believe that our car was in Scotland when we weren't. They are, in many ways, stupid idiots.
The journey today turned out to be a long haul. I left the house at 8.50am and arrived at Glasgow Central at 5pm and it took four trains to get there. It wasn't as tiring as driving or being driven, but it was hard to believe that I then had to do a show as well. That's not fair. I'd already done the hard work of sitting on a train failing to get much writing done.
I did try, but surprisingly the train wifi was incredibly unreliable. You'd think by now they'd have managed to get that sorted out, but they are still working on some crank based internet and the person at the crank also has to check the tickets and do the food trolley, so it's not getting cranked very much. Annoyingly it works a bit. At least if it didn't work at all then you could give up on it. I think it's possible that train wifi is part of a long running prank, that Ashton Kutcher is going to jump out of a train toilet in 10 years and tell us all that we've been punk'd. That would be the kind of punking that I could get on board with (no pun intended). Commitment over many, many years. Like Christianity. Jesus is coming back eventually, but just to tell us it was a joke.
It was a day when I wanted access to the outside world as remarkably the contracts for the sale of our old house were going through today. Would anything go wrong last minute? Would my always reliable solicitor choose today to go rogue and run off with all the money? I am sure there would be bigger deals that could tempt him to the dark side and I am also sure that he earns enough to not have to go into direct theft, but until I saw the money in my bank account I couldn't be sure and until I had good wifi then I wouldn't know.
Goodbye ghosts!
Of course everything went fine and we are now in the comfortable position of owning one house (with a pretty big mortgage) rather than two houses with two. We won't be haemorrhaging money at quite the same rate as we have for the last year and we might be able to take a nice holiday after Edinburgh.
I don't have my blood pressure monitor with me, but I suspect my blood pressure has dropped. We took a chance moving before we'd sold our house, but I really like where we've ended up
If you're selling a house in the North Herts area I recommend Sandra Cole. We'd tried big name estate agents, but they were bascially sitting back and waiting for rightmove to do its work (the previous one got us no viewings in four months), but Sandra grabbed it by the scruff of the neck in January and found people who were interested and sold it hard (if a little cheaply).
My third train ran a little late and my projected train from Edinburgh to Glasgow had left, but I saw there was one to Glasgow Central leaving in 20 minutes. Little did I know that this was the slow train, so slow that at times it felt like it might be travelling backwards. It seemed to stop at every house between these fine cities, like some kind of track based Santa. Would I even make it in time for the 7pm show?
There is, of course, a faster train and I had made a rookie error, but in the end I wouldn't have had time to get to the hotel first, so it made no difference.
Of course I did. And though early sales had looked a bit dire for this one, it was pretty much sold out and the Glasgow Stand is maybe the best stand up room and audience in the UK (and possibly the world beyond though I don't have much experience there). I thought my day of travel would have dampened me, but maybe the freedom from economic burden had invigorated me, because it was maybe the best performance yet. On nights like this I wonder why I remain a relatively niche comedian. I was pretty much hitting everything and finding whole new ways of doing some of the jokes. It's understandable but a but unfair that it's early shows that get reviewed (even though the reviews for this show were good) - it went up a couple of notches on the subsequent tour and this run has been at another level above that. As I keep saying I count my blessing that I get the audiences I do, but sometimes inevitably I think why don't more people know about this!?
The problem with doing good stand up gigs is you become an egomaniacal idiot. Thank goodness I never got into doing cocaines as well. Comedians do not require a bump to their ego. Yet so many of them went for it in the old days. Not the boring new clean living comics who have no idea what the job is really about. Nor indeed the boring old me who was scared to take drugs and went back to his flat alone and cried due to his loneliness.
Doing a stand up room is very different to a theatre and the crowd were close enough to determine that I was not 177cm by any stretch of the imagination or the rack. The intimacy led to some lovely moments of play and I took my time over bits that I sometimes plough onwards through. I think I've enjoyed ever performance so far in 2025, but this one was special. Great crew, great audience and it was especially gratifying that the person operating the tech told me how great they thought the show was. They see a lot of great comedy in this room, so their enthusiasm meant a lot.
One audience member told me that this was the first time he'd been to a stand up comedy show. I told him it isn't always as good as this, but hopefully he'll keep coming to the Stand to catch me in my lie.
They had the room set up for filming for the Comedy Festival and kindly said they'd film this performance too, so we might be able to offer it as a DVD extra as I am sure it will be quite a different deal to a half full theatre in Stevenage (where hopefully we'll be filming if the kickstarter keeps moving! The gig is 14th May and the theatre is practically inside the train station - I walked across to look this morning as i waited for my second train and it's less than a minute's walk across the footbridge - so it's easy to get to and get home from if you don't live hundreds of miles away).
One of the best RHLSTP Book Clubs I've done (and fresh off the production line) went up today, with lovely Anthony Shapland talking about "A Room Above A Shop".
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Onward to Edinburgh, which was at least not an eight hour journey, unless you took the train that stops at every house. Bollings and I had lunch with comedian Joz Norris, who was in town for some gigs and trumped my story of the terrible woes of having travelled up on a first class train ticket, as he'd taken the overnight bus to get here. He's young and as far as I know doesn't have any kids, so one sleepless night isn't going to kill him. He's a very funny man and we laughed our way through lunch at the City Cafe. You would really need to be there to understand this, but for some reason we came up with a podcast idea where we would chat to each other whilst taking a shower together, which I don't think has been done yet. I also think there might be a podcast in me trying to convince other comics to come on my podcast where we shower together to see what their reaction would be. You heard about it here first.
I said I'd pay for lunch on the proviso that both of the others pretended I was their dad. So they had to say "Thanks dad" as the waitress came with the bill. And if she didn't hear then they had to say to her "He's our dad." So that the waitress would think I was their dad. Joz was happy to do so, even though he'd only had a couple of drinks. I think I might have found my kink.
He's a brilliantly funny man. Do go and see him if you can. Plus he will call you dad for a coffee and a coke.
Jenny Eclair has written a great substack about what it's like to tour and the importance of solitude. Though I am not quite as fastidious in my pre-show prep as her (I just hope I will remember the good new bits I put in the night before), much of this resonates. I do tend to keep myself to myself as much as possible and not seek out friends who might be in town - but maybe that's a mistake. It was great to have a sociable lunchtime before retreating to my cocoon. I cried with laughter today.
In the early days of solo touring I hated the loneliness of the long distance punner and found the post-show come down almost unbearable. Occasionally I found someone to have a drink with and even more occasionally managed a sleepover with a new friend, but mainly I was left drinking wine alone in a Travelodge bar, not wanting to go up to my room because there was someone else's bogey on the shower curtain (that only happened once, but it sums up the experience perfectly). Nowadays I feel very comfortable with my own company and my wife has said I have to stop with the sleepovers (which I pretend to reluctantly go through with, but in fact no one wants to sleepover with me anymore, but it's nice to pretend it's my decision). The idea of having to entertain anyone (in any way) post gig is now too horrible to contemplate. I usually have one drink with Bollings and then retire to bed to wait for the adrenaline to dissipate and then to try and claim more than six hours of solid sleep. I miss the family a lot, but solitude is not only desirable, but wonderful, almost as much as it is necessary pre-gig. Before the show it's like I need to turn off sociability entirely, because I am about to go through a 90 minute pantomime where I am the most sociable and socially domineering person in the world.
I don't know which me is me. Am I the dull, quiet idiot who I appear to be for 22 and a half hours a day or the exuberant joke, full of life that I am for 90 minutes? I love the way that being on stage makes me feel, but I am also glad that that me is largely in a box for the rest of the time. I guess I've spent most of my life trying to keep him in the box for more and more of my day. There was a time when he was out of the box any time I wasn't on my own. And when I hated being on my own. Or maybe it was him making me hate being on my own because he needed the audience.
I am not mental.
Walking up to the venue later I was recognised by a man who told me he loved my Metro column (and was surprised to find out I hadn't done that for a decade), He was a nice, if rather intense man who told me that God had cured his ADHD, which was nice of God (though He seems to be slacking on curing the ADHD of the millions of other people who have it). It was a fun little chat and even though the man seemed to be a fan of my work, he didn't seem interested in buying a ticket for the show.
When will God cure me of the me in the box?
Back in a theatre tonight, so it was a slightly different performance, (the Queens Hall is very echoey) but another one that I was very pleased with. Well over 300 people in (which is great if you ignore the venue holds 800) I've really kicked off any remaining shackles and the show is both tight and loose and playful and serious. A man on the front row was really enjoying it and occasionally heckled with a line that was basically just explaining the joke I'd just done (like a real life version of Twitter) but I lightly took the piss, which he enjoyed as well and the show was clearly resonating with him so I didn't have to go all Peter Kay on his ass. Unboxed me is on top form right now. Probably because I keep him in the box so much more successfully.
Never let me eat after midnight though.
I forgot to do a video backstage in Glasgow, but did one in my hotel in Edinburgh instead. But for some reason it didn’t record! But I remembered to do the one in the dressing room in Edinburgh. Paid subs can watch that below this line.