The attempt to get the second draft of my sitcom done by Christmas seems doomed to failure. I just started making some progress at about 4 this afternoon, but we were driving out to the in-laws at 6 and I doubt there will be any writing opportunities on Christmas Eve, so I'll just have to make the end of the year my new deadline. And that's one I have to hit because I don't want this hanging over me on holiday. Hopefully Santa will bring me a completed script on Tuesday and I can have three weeks of relaxing.
Robin Ince had rung me up this afternoon and asked if I'd mind bowing out of the Bloomsbury gig as he'd booked too many acts. He always books too many acts (I think the show overran by a couple of hours last night) so for him to actually admit that things were out of hand at this early stage indicated that he was in real trouble. Though they might just have wanted me to keep away because of the number of packets of prawn cocktail crisps I have consumed in the green room. My greed has lost me so much work over the years: those Russell Howard Haribos and now this. It just doesn't make financial sense to employ me.
The plan to get through Christmas (as it is wherever I may be) is to get drunk and stay drunk. I stuck to it pretty well this evening. After dinner I played Scrabble against my in-laws (mum, dad, brother and gran) and wife. It would probably have been politic to not be too competitive, but I could not betray the game of Scrabble by taking it easy or letting anything pass. At one point my wife's 89 year old gran played the word "quelch" on a double word score with the q on a double letter score for an amazing 52 points. It felt like it was a word, but the more I thought about it the less likely it seemed. "What do you mean by quelch?" I asked. She replied "As in to quelch your thirst." A lesser man than me might have let that go, but I love words (and victory) and so pointed out that the word was "quench". As it happened gran had a n and just changed the letters over. According to tournament rules she should have taken back all her letters and missed her go after a correct challenge. But it was Christmas and I have to be with these people for the next three days and I pretended to be magnanimous and let her off that slip up. The only other option was to throw the board across the room and swear at everyone before running out the door into the dark, wet Hertfordshire night. I very nearly did that. I could have found another wife eventually. With so many players a score like that could have wrapped things up, but I managed to use the Q to play "quit" on a triple word score and played consistently and won in the end despite the despicable rule-breaking that was going on all around me. My wife told me I had to be more gracious in victory. I shouted in her face, "It's too late, we're married now. You can't escape."
Quelch had not been in the Scrabble dictionary on my phone, but it sounded so like a word that I decided to check it online. According to the urban dictionary
it has a few meanings, the most satisfactory being that it is similar to a queef (a vaginal belch). So I had to doff my Scrabble hat to gran. She got those points fair and square.
The Christmas snooker podcast
is now up. Listen to it alone in your bedsit on Christmas Day, on a loop, for full tragic value. In fact listen to all 26 while drinking pints of sherry. It should fill all the waking hours of the saddest day of they year.
