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The replacement table tennis table arrived just as I was about to head off to Harrogate. I got them to open the box so I could check it. It seemed fine. But it's a least a two person job to put it together, so the kids will have to await my return.
Still far from fully recovered, though tonight's show was a little less encumbered by lurgy. I'd had time for another weird, mildly trippy afternoon nap where as usual I was trapped between being fully awake and fully asleep. Nice to return to Harrogate Theatre though, which has the coldest backstage toilet in the UK and maybe the Universe (based on my extensive research). Even though it had been a warm spring day, it was Arctic cold in there tonight. I think a thousand or so comedians might have died in there and it is haunted by their frigid spirits.
About a year ago Phoebe looked down at me from the stairs and gleefully told me I was going bald. My hair is all that is left to me, with the rest of my body basically having given up the fight, and though it has been drained of pigment it has stayed resolutely thick. My grandad Don had head of copious white hair right to the end and I assumed that I'd inherited that from him. But I think Phoebe might be right. Things do seem to be thinning a little up there. There's so much hair that it's pretty easy to Bobby Charlton things up for a good while yet, but I am definitely seeing more skull skin than used to be visible.
Let me have something Jesus. You've taken my ball, my penis is cold and useless, my beer belly is back even though I don't drink real beer any more, let me keep my fucking hair. It allows me to pretend to myself that I am pushing forty instead of pushing sixty. Don't make me look exactly my age.
I don't know what I'd look like if I was bald - though I suppose my turn as Peter Dibdin gives me a little idea - but I don't think it will be good. My head is very big, so I assume I'd look like anthropomorphised light bulb.
I did have a skin head for a play at University - I was a tiny part in a production of the Threepenny Opera, but managed to at least partly steal the show with my dim-witted number two length haired character. But a skinhead that will grow back is not the same. The skinhead drew attention to me (just like I wanted). Being bald will make me like all the other old nonentities and thus invisible. You'd think a talking light bulb with a face would attract people's attention like a moth to a talking light bulb with a face, but it wouldn't. People don't want to see that kind of thing.
For now there's still enough hair there for me to pretend I'm OK and hopefully I will die before the baldness encroaches too much. I want my skellington to have long hair on it so it scares any kids who dig me up looking for the treasure I am going to be buried with. Also I need to pretend I am not as old as I am. Please let me pretend.
RHLSTP with one of my favourite ever guests John Kearns (for the first time allowed into the actual Leicester Square Theatre)
is now up here. 
