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Perhaps inevitably I felt worse again today. But I was so relieved to be back with the family that it didn't really matter that my cough had gone deeper into my chest again. We played a lot of ping pong and then went for pizza where Phoebe wanted to play Wordle. She'd choose a word and I had to guess it. She was excited about trying to defeat me as I was at showing her I was unbeatable. I have created my perfect nerdy playmate and I couldn't be happier. It's slightly harder playing the game on paper as you have to keep track of letters used in your head, but I was victorious, until she tried a 6 letter word and it ended up being s - e--h and it could only be a g in the fifth spot and I was unable to think of sleigh (though I had been thinking sledge, so subconsciously I do think I got it). Of course, as in the table tennis, it was me letting her win.
Ernie has started an improv game where he asked for a place, an object and an accent - say the moon, a fork and Italian and he'll then basically put on a terrible accent and say "Look I am on the moon, with a fork". He too is his father's son. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
Tonight I went to a reunion for the Oxford Revue Workshop, the comedy club at University where Stew and I first worked together. It was started almost 39 years ago by Tony Brennan, who sadly couldn't be with us tonight on account of him no longer being alive. Which to be fair was a good excuse. But it was sad that the man responsible for all of this was not able to be there. He would have been very chuffed by the turn out and the affection for his club though. We're idiots for not thinking of doing this while he was still alive.
Tonight I'd been asked to say a few words about him and decided to wing it, which was a risk perhaps, but it turned out well. Tony would have been amused that when I mentioned that he was dead, Martin Pickles, who'd done all kinds of weird and wonderful and not so wonderful comedy early on in the club's history, expressed surprise. No one had told him. What a way to find out. I would have broken the news more gently had I known.
About forty or so people turned up, mostly broken middle-aged men, some of whom I hadn't seen for thirty years or more and some who came after my time. It's a shock to see a face that was young the last time you saw it, now lined and grey. Luckily my face is still the same.
I think maybe Armando and me might have been the only people from the original year (maybe Martin Pickles, but I think he came a year later), but a good smattering of successful writers and internet pioneers and a few people who are still performing were there: Al Murray, Ben Moor, Paul Foot and Nick Doody were in attendance and I had a nice chat with Waen Shepherd (aka Gary Le Strange). It was all rather lovely and horrifying at the same time. But the Workshop was something that set us all on our way and gave us the confidence to take things further. That room was so small (we weren't there tonight) and only seated 40 people who were charged 50p each to attend. I remember feeling it was a runaway success when we had to put on extra shows to keep up with demand. We were selling 80 tickets every other Sunday and bringing in £40. We were superstars.
Happy days and such an intense period of my life that it feels like a lot more than three years and a lot nearer than 1989 (when I left University), but nice to celebrate it and spend some time talking to those people again - this time in a different cellar. I also got to perform part of My Penis Can Sing for the first time in a while (I think I did it in Lord of the Dance Settee - it was my first bit at the ORW and my first attempt at ventriloquism). I wrote that at school, so that is 40 year old material (at least). My penis doesn't sing as much as it did back then.
