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I still can’t get used to the ridiculous way that inspiration works. I felt like I spent all day battering on a door, not even making a dent in it, getting nowhere. I had a bath, played Addams Family Pinball and cleared my brain and then idly looking through Twitter, saw a comment in a news story that made me laugh, came up with a sketch about it and suddenly the flood gates opened. It was like I’d wasted all that time banging on the door and now just found the key under a flower pot. All at once I had about four ideas that would probably be enough to make the show. But where the fuck had they been in the previous 36 hours? Just gently bubbling on the back burner. It’s all needed of course. Even when you feel you’re getting nowhere your brain is quietly clicking through all the possible combinations to the safe and you only get to open it through bloody-minded persistence.
Inevitably the breakthrough came at about 3.30pm and I was meeting my wife and daughter for dinner at a pub at 5, so I didn’t have time to glean my teaming brain. But I was glad to get a little time off and drink a pint of Guinness and laugh with my not-really-any-longer-a baby. On the next table a big gang of loud twenty-somethings were enjoying a long afternoon of doing fuck all. I remembered the times a quarter of a century ago when my own gang of mates would do the same thing: get drunk, talk too loudly and I wondered if we were as annoying. Well they weren’t really annoying. They made me nostalgic and non-nostalgic at the same time. Sitting outside it all you could almost smell the insecurity and desperation to please that comes with such a gathering. I envied them their youth and their lack of responsibility, whilst still feeling absolutely elated that I was out of it. They seemed a lot posher and more privileged than my own group of twenty-something dongs though, so they were maybe more irritating than we were. Who knows. The forty-somethings that we annoyed in 1992 are probably all dead now. So we can’t ask them.
Some people look back at the young and say, “We were never like that†and get annoyed by their positivity and noise, but the truth is we were exactly like that and I remember it all well enough to know how much bubbling self-loathing and doubt will be filling those people in their prime. I wouldn’t swap places, but nor did I resent them. I was glad to be reminded of a golden (if showery) time of of my life, even if I know that to some extent I could have had a much better time if I hadn’t been such a dick. But that’s the Catch 22 of life.
It’s mind-boggling though to think that I am no longer twenty-something and am twice the age of the people at that table. I really can’t get my head round that at all. Today’s awful realisation was that kids who weren’t even born when I started University have not only been through college but also done a post-graduate degree.
But never mind, I mourned my youth but thanked the Heavens for what I have and where I am now. Not so excited about where I will be in 25 more years. Or the fact that the last 25 went so fast.
Please come along and see AIOTM on Sunday if you can. The more people that are there, the more fun it will be, plus your door money goes towards paying our extra production costs. And the first three have been really good nights. All details here.
