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Tuesday 3rd March 2015

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Surprisingly the incident at Chorley has become a minor news story. I was asked to go on 5 Live to discuss it last night (though declined as I needed to catch up on sleep) and today it was featured on the Telegraph website (and a few other outlets). The luckless Gary, on his first date in 18 years (due to having been in a long-term relationship, thus setting himself apart from my regular audience members who can claim the same long-term lack of dating action, without the excuse of being spoken for), has ended up being interviewed and offered free membership of an online dating site. So hopefully this might lead to a more successful night out with a more broad-minded woman who doesn’t expect all comedians to do Peter Kay material. Or just a religious person who doesn’t think it’s a blasphemy to acknowledge that some hymns open themselves to puerile misinterpretation. 
I am not sure that it’s great publicity to be lauded as a comedian who you shouldn’t take a date too, but at least two married couples with kids got in touch to say that they had seen me on early dates and their love had survived. In a sense,  I suppose, their children owe their lives to me and should become my lifelong slaves. Perhaps I could market the show as a test of love and provide T-shirts for anyone who gets to the end of the evening harmoniously.
 You can view a small portion of the amazing incident on this clip on vimeo, though it will be worth waiting until this week’s Lord of the Dance Settee podcast in which I will be putting up as much of the audio as I can (without giving too much in the way of spoilers for the show itself). It's funny not because I cope with it particularly well at the time (I was too blind-sided to be very witty about it, but was a bit more successful with the call-backs later), but because of my lack of belief that this was the moment that anyone could leave one of my shows. The funnier stuff was realising that this was a first date, which hopefully, will be in the podcast in audio form.
I was out this evening filming a poker-based TV pilot with some actors and comedians. I haven’t been playing too much poker recently, but things were going pretty well and it was an enjoyable format. They had asked me what cocktail I had wanted to drink during the game so I thought I’d push the boat out and have a martini. It turned out that everyone else was having slightly less ostentatious drinks and most of them not even having alcohol. But I drank a couple of largish glasses and we didn’t get anything to eat until later on so I was a bit giddy. But if you’re going to play poker then you have to be like James Bond and as we discussed around the table, nothing is truer to the real game of poker than the scene in Casino Royale. If you wanted to show how brilliant a poker player bond is then he should really have bluffed his way through with a King high, but everyone round the table has royal flushes or other ridiculously good hands. 
Indeed the way the play went reminded me why I had stopped playing so much poker. Three or four crucial hands went the way of the players who made the dodgiest decisions. Graham was more or less knocked out when his trip 9s were beaten on the river by Hattie Hayridge hitting trip 10s and two other players survived hands that should have knocked them out. So Graham and me were a little unfairly the first two out, but I was secretly pleased as the record had run on longer than it should have and I felt guilty for leaving my wife alone with the baby for another evening. Luckily I had had some pizza by then so I was sober enough to take over baby duties. I’ve met quite a few dads now who secretly tell me that they didn’t really like their babies that much to begin with- and I can understand that a baby is just a weird food tube which you have to feed at one end and then clean at the other and it doesn’t do much to begin with or interact with you very much. Maybe it’s because I have been away or maybe it’s just because I’ve waited so long to be a dad, but I am still loving every minute, even the late night grizzles. I accidentally fell asleep with Phoebe in my arms tonight and though I woke with a jolt (luckily in the same position with her totally safe) and felt stupid for having drifted off and thus having taken a slight risk, it felt amazing to be with her. She was so deeply asleep and relaxed and content, which isn’t always the case in the middle of the night. I don’t know how anyone couldn’t like this, despite the battering your brain takes with being dragged from deep sleep. I didn’t fall in love with her the second that she was born, and was a bit afraid of this screaming troll who had emerged so violently and angrily from the most unexpected place you can imagine. But within an hour I felt a connection and now I am smitten. To the extent that coming fifth out of six in a poker game is no longer a cause for anger and resentment. I got to go home early. That in itself is the most remarkable change that fatherhood can have wrought. Maybe in three or four months I will relish being away on tour or grabbing an extra hour in the pub with adults, but for now I wish I could be home all the time.


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