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Thursday 12th July 2018

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Oh Frig-on, I’m 51! Did they take a couple of months out of this year?
Here I am though. And if I live as long as my grandma then I am now half way through my life. All logic says I will live longer than her, because I am more modern. So plenty of Warming Ups still to come….. great.
We’d had a fun day and enjoyed the cake and I’d eaten Marmite flavoured caramel popcorn too and found it very moreish. 
In the evening Catie and me sat in a beer garden in Hitchin drinking gin and tonics. Mine had some coriander seeds in it. What a world. The sun was shining and I felt pretty relaxed and remarked about how unusual it was for me to feel like this in July. Nearly every summer since 1992 I have been working on an Edinburgh show on my birthday - often having to give up any kind of celebration because I’d be writing or re-writing. Even though I have only done one of the last four Fringes (if you include 2018), I’ve nearly always had something similar going on. I couldn’t really remember what I was doing in July 2016 - though I have looked briefly at Warming Up and was writing sitcom pilots, doing podcasts and doing the odd preview for The Best - but the other times that I missed the Fringe it was because of other work commitments. So this was a very rare feeling of unpressured contentment on my birthday. I liked it. I must make sure I don’t waste the next 50 birthdays with work
Above the archway that led to the beer garden was a sign saying “The last public hanging in Hitchin is said to have been in the yard of the Red Hart Public House.”  It was in 1997.

Anyway 51 seems a whole lot older than 50. I am now in my fifties rather than just 50. If I was God you would get to 50 and then get a year younger every birthday and get a second chance at every age, with the wisdom you had accrued on the journey up. You wouldn’t go back to the same life you had at that age. I would now be 49 again and have a little less grey hair, but my family and job would continue to age (until they hit 50 at least) and I’d know all know. You wouldn’t have to go back to school when you were 16. You’d be 84 years of age and have that experience, but be in your teenage body. Come on. That’s be ace. Admittedly you’d be a 99 year old in a baby’s body, but that’s more or less what happens anyway. At least you’d be cute. Not sure who’d look after you. But presumably there would be old babies’ homes. You wouldn’t have to go back up your mum when it was all over. But you could do. If that’s what you both wanted (though your mum would already be back in her own mum and so on, so it’d be like some weird tiny Russian doll.
You know it makes sense.


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