Warming Up

I woke up at 4am even though I wasn’t in charge of the baby and couldn’t get back to sleep - always annoying - but as I lay there in bed my throat made an involuntary and very computer-like beep beep beep sound. There was no explanation for it, well except for one. Could I be a robot? Maybe my wife has paid for a Westward style holiday, where, instead of being a gunslinger in the wild west, she finds out what it was like to be married to a mediocre comedian in the early 21st Century. I am not sure why anyone would choose to holiday in a place where they are in charge of two young kids and their partner is away a lot, but perhaps in the future where she’s from, no one is able to have kids any more. Maybe this is the only way to experience that. And for some reason she wants to be married to a fat, snoring man who isn’t able to be much direct help.

Hey, it’s not my place to judge where this woman pretending to be my wife chooses to vacation. I can’t question anything. I am a robot programmed to go along with it, my mind filled with false memories. Probably reliving the same scenario over and over again without realising. What an irony it would be if I myself was a sex robot. And what an insult to me and my creators that the woman pretending to be my wife isn’t taking full advantage of my functions, even though she’s only here for a fortnight.

Anyway, it’s the only explanation for the beep beep beep. How do we know we’re not all robots? What are the chances that we all happened to be born? At a time when we had all this technology and relative affluence. The odds aren’t even calculable. None of this is real. Open your eyes electronic sheeple.

I had the pleasure of researching two very funny and clever guests for the podcast today, Al Murray, who I know a little about already and Desiree Burch who I had not met, but is very impressive on her online clips and who I’d been unable to get into see at Edinburgh because she was such a hot ticket. And although I was so blasted by tiredness that my brain hardly worked, I had a fine time on this penultimate recording of the series. Desiree was charming and funny and as erudite as I’d expected, having watched her wing a talk at Nerdcon after her computer had crashed and Al talked history, politics and Frankingstein sex. I haven’t done a really long podcast this series, mainly because I need to get home on the train, but Al seemed unwilling to wrap things up and even when I finally left the stage, he stayed on to deliver a long anecdote, which might not be fit for broadcast. I came back on stage to get my photo with him and then went off into the night, getting out of the venue before my audience.

I didn’t hold out much hope of catching the 11.04 train. But arrived at Kings Cross at 11 and then did my best to run through the tunnels and up the escalators. If I needed evidence of how unfit I was this was it. Only three and a half years ago I had run 13 miles in under one hour 50, but this three and a half minutes of jogging left me coughing and flustered and I thought I might be having a heart attack. I made the train with 20 seconds to spare. It then was a minute late.

I took this unpleasantness as a sure sign that I have to stop being such a dick and get fit again as soon as possible. The day will come when I can’t run for a train, but I’d like it to be a decade or two away.

The journey home was a little weird. I was sitting opposite a lady who was on the phone. She seemed to be on her own. Another man was walking up and down the aisle, talking out loud, reading signs and passing comment on everything. He seemed at least terrifically drunk, but I wasn’t sure if he also might have some mental issues and was wary of him as, although he didn’t look too physically scary, he was behaving oddly and was a bit sweary.  

Suddenly he sat down opposite me and leant in towards the woman, looking at her intently. She didn’t acknowledge him and tried to carry on her phone conversation. I had to play this carefully. I couldn’t let him intimidate her like this, but also I didn’t want to risk turning a weird situation into a violent one. I tried to catch the woman’s eye, but she wasn’t really giving me any indication of whether she needed me to intervene. Would I be brave enough to do my citizenly duty?

It turned out that I was. As the man seemed to get a bit more over familiar I asked her if she was OK and she said that she knew the guy and was just ignoring him because he was so pissed. I thought it was odd that she hadn’t been sitting with him for the first part of the journey and hadn’t at least acknowledged him when he sat down. But was pleased that I’d done the right thing and not ended up having to deal with an angry drunk.

And aside from shouting and swearing he was pretty placid. His friend asked him to stop shouting every now and again and he himself mentioned Tourette’s, which had crossed my mind. But I am not sure he actually had that syndrome. I think this was just the drink talking. He thankfully fell asleep on his friend’s shoulder, but then was woken with a start by a mobile phone ringing and was off again. Then he tried to go to the toilet, but returned minutes later complaining that it was broken and none of the buttons were working. “If I’d paid for this I would be furious,” he shouted. “Wait, I did pay for it. I paid £25 and the toilet doesn’t even work. It’s disgusting.”

I was pretty sure that the toilet was working. Just his brain wasn’t. Luckily it was my stop coming up, so I didn’t get to see if he pissed himself.