OK, possibly my last Jacko observation for the moment (until he comes out of hiding) but it struck me as weird today that some people object to jokes being made about him now he's dead, whereas there were few objections made when similar jokes were made about him when he was alive. Surely that was the time to complain when there was a danger he might actually hear them and be hurt. Why complain now when he isn't around to hear them (unless like Uri Geller seems to think he is definitely up in Heaven and watching us all - though Uri said that on Sky News and I am pretty sure Michael would have been watching the BBC), rather than any time in the last twenty years? In fact shouldn't we wait until someone is dead and thus definitely out of ear shot before we start making the jokes?
Perhaps we shouldn't make jokes in either circumstance, but it just seems odd that the people who get affronted by it now almost certainly weren't complaining before. I think the world might be a better place if we at least reversed this convention and might be improved even further if people didn't mind about you making jokes at any time. I just thought it was quite interesting.
Complete days off have been few and fair between this year, but I managed another one today and it was blissful. I really need to make time for more of these, though with the weekend nature of part of my job (the performance bit) it can be tricky. But neither a gig or any writing to do today (though my mind can never quite switch off and my mind was going over the new show every now and again), so just had a fun time with my girl, bumming around London (oh not like that, you are so immature).
We went to Kew Gardens for a picnic and though it was a little bit cloudy it was a pleasant day and was just awesome to get out of the house and relax in beautiful surroundings. The stupid thing is that I could do this kind of thing every day if I just took a notebook with me, but tend to just skulk around in my house, trawling the internet, watching TV and trying and largely failing to work. London is a beautiful town and I must try and treat it more like I am a tourist here and get out and see stuff.
After we ate our food and drank our champagne I lay back and looked at the sky. Kew is right under the flight path for Heathrow, which means the calm was shattered at regular intervals by planes coming in to land, but I found them oddly fascinating. As they descended they seemed to be going so slowly that they must surely fall out of the sky at any second. Somehow they stayed aloft. I thought of how amazing we are as a species to have conquered flight and to have made such bulky chunks of metal successfully (usually) fly from one place to another. A few other creatures and primitive apes utilise stones and reeds and stuff as tools and yet we've managed to manipulate metals and oils and all the tiny components that make up an aeroplane and make them fucking fly. We rock. I don't care if it destroys the world. Hats off to the human race. You're brilliant.
It was odd to be lying amongst all this nature and be thinking about these things.
Yet I continued to look to the skies and watched the clouds. A large mass of white cloud was heading towards an equally large volume of grey cloud. Would they collide or pass harmlessly over and under each other. The suspense was unbearable. Finally they seemed to merge into one, the whiteness being consumed by the grey. The forces of nature were just as fascinating as the achievements of mankind.
I thought of a lazy afternoon from around about 33 years ago when I lay on the field at Fairlands Middle School with my best friend Phil Fry, lying side by side on our backs, watching the few scudding white clouds in an otherwise gloriously blue summer sky. We were nine or ten years old and had known each other only for a year or two. I am delighted to say that we are still friends three decades later. For an entire lunchtime we looked up at the clouds in the sky and started commenting on what each cloud resembled, enjoying changing our description as the shapes of the clouds subtly shifted as they moved. We lay back in awe of the beauty and majesty of the skies above us, but also giggling like schoolboys (which of course we were) at our descriptions and the power of our imaginations. I can't remember any of the specifics, but it was a bit more than "That one looks like a car," or "That one looks like a rabbit," or "Look over there, that one resembles a cloud." It was more like, "There's a dog with the body that's a train carriage, but now it's morphing into a witch with a hook where her legs should be."
It was the first time I had ever looked at the clouds in this way and I imagine that at some point you did something similar with a friend, on a lazy hot afternoon in your childhood. It was magical and brilliant and I can still feel the contentment and friendship and joy that I felt back then.
I think I always wanted to spend another hour or so doing the same thing again, but if we ever tried it was never as pure or perfect or funny. It was definitely one of the best hours of my life and it could not be recreated.
I felt similarly content today, even though the cloud cover was too uniform to play this game. I didn't mention any of this to my girlfriend, but I felt happy having her lying beside me. It was a different feeling than I had had with Phil Fry (I think), but similar in that for a few minutes nothing in the world mattered and we had no cares beyond who we were with and where we were and could lie back and watch the world go round. As a kid you don't really have too much pressure from work (however tricky you think lessons might be), so it's more satisfying when you get these moments now, but they can never be as pure and unaffected as they were, when you really didn't have a care in the world.
I might give Phil a ring on the next sunny day and see if he wants to come and lie on Shepherd's Bush Grey with me and watch the clouds.
Kew was Kewl though and I especially enjoyed the tree top walk way, where you get about 20m or so metres up into the air and can traverse around a little wood from a bird's eye view. It was also quite fun as a few bits of the metal grid we were walking on seemed to move or buckle under our feet and I felt that any second I might be sent plummeting to the ground.
Later we went to see an enjoyably rubbish film "Drag Me to Hell" and then out for a pizza at the Westfield, looking out over the empty plaza that looked like an unimaginative film set of the not too distant future, where lots of white spherical bollards were dotted around for no good reason. I think the place might actually feature in one of the later Planet of the Apes films, even those were filmed a few decades before this complex existed.
Still it was cool to be sitting and eating alfresco on a pleasant summer evening, where it was still light enough at 9.30pm. And to not have to go on stage and entertain people.
Oh and I almost forgot. My moustache got its first compliment today. As we were heading for Kew an Australia couple asked for directions and though I was a bit lost myself I gave them my best help possible. As we found the right turning they thanked me again and the man said, "Cheers. I love your moustache by the way." He seemed mildly amused by it, though clearly having spoken to me had ascertained that I wasn't a threat and that he could make a cheeky, jocular comment. Either that or he, like most Australians, was simply a racist.
