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Another packed day, starting with a trek across town to Tower Bridge to have my poster shot done for the new show “Oh Frig, I’m 50!â€
It’s almost ten years to the day since I did the poster shoot for “Oh Fuck, I’m 40!†and a lot of this was fresh in my mind today. It feels recent and the distant, distant past at the same time. I am not the same man as I was then, though weirdly I was working on You Can Choose Your Friends then (though we’d just filmed it) and now I am working on Relativity, revolving around much the same characters. I remember that cake and taking it home to my girlfriend at the time and her son.
There was no cake today, though there will be balloons on the finished poster, and I was back on the houseboat of my now regular Fringe photographer Steve Brown. We’ve done some ambitious shoots involving sofas, lamb’s hearts, climbing out of holes in the ground, skeleton make-up, Braveheart make-up and shaving down to offensive moustaches, but today was just some fairly straight portraits. It didn’t take us long.
You’ll the first to see however this turns out.
And then we were heading off to Bath for another tour gig. For once I managed to work quite successfully in the car and completed the rewrites for episode 1 of Relativity that we’re recording on Monday. I got to the Komedia dressing room and pressed on with episode 2.
I was called to the stage to a mic check and noticed that the back of my trousers were very wet. Which was odd because I hadn’t spilled any water, or noticed that I’d sat in any or leant against anything wet. It was too localised and damp and cold a patch to be sweat. Surely I hadn’t somehow wet myself. It would be bad enough to have lost control of my functions, but to do so without noticing would be worse. The wet patch was surely too high up the back of my trousers to have emanated from any orifice. I only have one orifice round the back and it was significantly lower than the splash of liquid.
But I was genuinely perturbed about how this had happened. I could see no spillage anywhere, the chair I’d been sitting in seemed dry to the touch. I took off my trousers and they were quite wet. As was my underwear. I took the bold step of smelling my jeans and luckily the liquid had no odour. I don’t think it was possible that my anus had turned into some kind of hosepipe which had shot cold, clean water all over the top of my bottom, without me even noticing. But I couldn’t think of many other explanations and was worrying that I might have reached the age where inexplicable incontinence to effluent that didn’t match the orifice that it was near was now going to be my future.
My underpants though were certainly less wet than my jeans which suggested, surely that the liquid, whatever it may be, had entered my trousers from the external world, rather than exited from inside me. But maybe I was just hoping that I didn’t now have such an old and gaping anus that shot water round the bend of my bottom without me noticing and had started to do wees instead of poos. We know that that particular exit can sometimes produce stuff that isn’t as solid as you might hope, but its’ rarely pure, distilled water.
I started to piece together what must have happened. The water was very much on the part of my trousers that would contact with a seat. Might I have sat on a bottle of water in the car? But then not noticed it seeping into my garments or spotted it for 2 hours?
I looked back at the chair I had been sitting in. It seemed pretty dry (and if there was wetness there it might have come off me rather than the other way round. But the seat was made of foam. Very like a sponge. Surely the most likely explanation was that someone had previously spilled (hopefully) water on to the chair, it had seeped into the foam and then when I had sat on it, gradually squeezed into my clothing without me noticing.
I think and hope that must be the case, cos the water fountain anus is too horrible to contemplate (though might be a money-spinner).
Meanwhile I had to dry my underwear and jeans on a small heater in the dressing room, as I sat pantless on the very chair that had caused this incident. And indeed a little more dampness emerged. Like a bottom-half-naked Sherlock Holmes I had solved this mystery via impeccable logic.
And the glamour of showbiz is confirmed. I dried my pants on a fan heater and thanked God for continence. At least for now.
The gig was nearly full and the crowd were friendly. I had a nice time. We then headed off into the night to make some headway on our weekend journey through a huge rectangle taking in most of England.
