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Someone was asking me and Nick Helm why we don’t a Twitter blue tick to prove we really are who we say we are. I have been offered one, but thought it seemed a bit unnecessary and wanky. My reasoning is that I can’t really see anyone wanting to pretend to be me (or, to be fair, Nick Helm), but also, by not having one it gives the tantalising possibility that I am not me and that someone thinks I am worth impersonating. I mean I think you only ever get impersonated because someone thinks you’re a cunt and makes you want to look bad, but any reaction is good and I am so boring that that kind of thing could only do me good.
I don’t respect the blue tick so I don’t want one. Maybe you need one if you’re Madonna or Queen Elizabeth II, but otherwise, get over yourself blue tickos (or blue thickos as I like to call them - no wait poo thickos is what I like to call them…. no poo sick hoes).
I think this makes me unusual to be honest. I don’t know if anyone who has a blue tick really sees it as a status symbol (even though some trolls seem to think that they think they do), but even though I am a fan of showing off, I’ve found that kind of showing off a bit embarrassing. Maybe the rebellion against it is worse. I retweeted a Mark Twain quote the other day about turning down an award being an excellent way to get more fuss about you getting the award (he said it better than that, but I can’t be arsed to look it up) and maybe I enjoy people occasionally questioning why I don’t have one. But to be fair, it hardly ever happens and when it does there is always the assumption that I don’t have one because I am not famous enough, so that would be a weird way to show off.
In the same string of tweets I brought up the fact that I never picked up my degree too - leading to a minor discussion about whether I can still call myself a graduand. The guy I was tweeting with said I couldn’t because I had graduated with the rest of my “class†regardless of if I actually went. But at my University you don’t graduate with your class mates and do it when you feel like it and I am pretty sure I am still a graduand therefore. The graduation website talks of historic graduands which makes it sound like I am right, but also makes me sound like some kind of shady seventies light entertainer who has finally been pulled up by the courts.
I didn’t pick up my degree partly again because I had no respect for it. I was amazed that I passed at all, as I really hadn’t worked hard enough (and was so convinced that I’d failed I stopped revising - though I wasn’t even really revising as I hadn’t done much of the work in the first place - and started drinking in the daytime instead). Again there’s a show- offy element to saying, hey I didn’t do any work and I still got a decent degree. Because clearly I am a fucking genius to pull that off. But I have no pride in failing to do academic work at Uni (though to be fair all the extra curricular stuff I did laid the solid bedrock of the career I am still enjoying, whereas a top history degree wouldn’t have been very much use to me).
In reality I was very unhappy as I approached those exams, as I’d never gone into any proper exam so unprepared in my life. I was considering anything to get out of it, even in darker moments the possibility of ending it all (but I don’t think I would ever have done something like that), but certainly deferring for a year so I could do the work I’d failed to do for three years. I still dream about it to this day, pondering about giving up my career to go back to Uni. For someone who academia had been the most important thing it was a very queasy revolt to have gone into my Final and most important exams with so little to fall back on. It was my teenage rebellion, much too late (though to be fair that’s still going on in some respects), but I feared about what it would all mean for my future.
So when my scrounging of notes, working out what questions would come up, one term of proper work (though I got the worst mark on that paper, but managed to use some of it to get an unlikely first on one of the other papers) and the ability to remember loads of stuff (and actual quotations) from my A level history 4 years before, got me through, it didn’t feel like I deserved it. So I never went to pick it up.
And thinking about that today, I realised how selfish that was. I was against the pomp of the graduation ceremony as well, of course, which was also a factor. But I was only thinking of myself. The graduation ceremony is really for the parents isn’t it? Seeing photos of my wife and her brother at graduates in my in-laws house makes me realise that I denied my now parents the same excuse to show off about my bogus achievement.
I mean I could still graduate now (I don’t think I am going to though) and my parents would still be there to see it. But I don’t know if it’s quite the same having a photo of your 50 year old son dressed up in all the stupid academic gear. I always said I would graduate at the same time as my child, though again might have left that too late and though I am pretty sure Phoebe is definitely clever enough to get into University, what if she makes the same pointless stand against convention.
It looks likely I will be a graduand til I die. Unless that bloke was right and I am not one anyway.
But it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth now. I should have done this at the proper time. As meaningless as my degree turned out to be to my life.
I was back on form in front of my sell-out crowd tonight. Yesterday the show had felt like I was performing underwater and I didn't feel sharp within myself (this stupid illness drags onwards, pretending to be going and then coming back). I was still poorly tonight, but felt more in control of what I was doing and it was loads of fun (even though lethargy did start to strike in the second half). I sold 1491 tickets over four shows in this theatre this week. I wish I could do that every week. Now bizarrely I get nearly four months without stepping through the door of the Leicester Square Theatre, which is practically my second home. I hope they do OK without me.
