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Every time I have damaged a car whilst driving I have been going at under 5 miles an hour and nearly always in reverse. The lesson I have learned is to always drive fast, especially if going backwards.
The good news is I am pretty safe when driving at 100 miles an hour (I imagine), but like a fucked up Back To The Future Delorean (or maybe more correctly an even slower bus in Speed) if I am crawling along, watch out!
My in-laws drive is a bit hard to turn around in, so this afternoon i decided to back into the space because I am a genius. Unfortunately due to not being very good at reversing and being tired I managed to take off the driver’s side wing mirror on a tree at the edge of their drive. I am not sure how I was that far over, but it was a severe and embarrassing misjudgement. And very annoying. Not only cos it’s going to cost a lot to repair, but because I had been planning to drive to Coventry in that car.
A few months ago I nearly took off the other wing mirror reversing out of a multi-storey car park space and forgetting there was a pillar there. That time the wing mirror broke into pieces but popped back together. This time…. I am not going to be able to fix it.
Fortunately we have two cars now, so I had to go in the bigger one, which is forever searching for Ryan, so I set off in that one.
I had been tired anyway, which I think accounted at least in part for my spectacular and costly misjudgement, but after an afternoon in sole charge of my puppy and my daughter I was pretty much destroyed. The drive to Coventry was tough. The drive home (along with the inevitable road closures) was tougher. I am getting too old for this shit. In 2004 when I got back into stand up I was up and down the motorways and as long as a drive was only 3 hours I’d give it a go at night time (and I occasionally did longer) mainly because I wasn’t paid enough to justify a hotel and because I was young and didn’t get tired until the last 30 miles. I am amazed more comedians aren’t in car crashes, though to be fair James Acaster has so many that we’re still way above average.
Nowadays I have to get home - someone has to walk the dog in the morning and my wife is using the excuse of being a fortnight away from giving birth and being unable to walk due to back pain. In hindsight this was a bad time to get a puppy, but we thought we were getting her in July to be fair and had no way of knowing that the building work that was meant to be finished in May would be still going on in mid-September (no way, apart from of course, the fact that this always happens with builders).
This is my only gig this month and although it was only 3 weeks since I last stepped on stage it felt like a life time ago. I tried to go through my Edinburgh set in the car on the way up, but I struggled to get beyond the second minute. This is why most stand ups are in their twenties. The old ones forget what they are meant to say and then die in car crashes when they fall asleep on the way home. It’s rare for a comedian to get into his fifties and I am sure I am about to be picked off by the jackals one way or another.
I thought I was a bit sluggish, but it was a big room with a high ceiling and the laughs can get lost. Four people walked out halfway through my set. I speculated that it was down to a Brexit comment that I had made about five minutes earlier. "It took them ages to actually leave," I commented, "Which is quite apt."
