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Into London today to record a double bubble Book Club with the man who has done more RHLSTPs than anyone else (and was about to do two more) Adam Buxton.
It's always lovely to see this hilarious and charmingly insecure man, though it struck me today that we have barely ever had a conversation that wasn't recorded. Only the stuff we've said to each other before and after a podcast record. Surely I've met him on some other occasion where there were no mics....? I am not sure I have.
I got the train into town, but the ticket machine screen was a bit sticky (luckily in technical terms, rather than covered in the slime of some Hitchin resident). I kept pressing the buttons to make my Network card be acknowledged but the machine did not want me to save a third off my fare. Did it know about the approximately £20 that I had cheated the train company out of by travelling illegally in first class?
Eventually I got the card acknowledged and paid for my tickets, only to find that all my faffing around had accidentally added a child's travelcard to my order. It had cost me a pretty reasonable £2 to be able to take a child with me, anywhere within the 6 zones of London. I had no child with me though and it didn't seem worth trying to precure one. I wondered about asking for my money back but realised that this was karma and that that £2 covered my first class trip from Hitchin to Stevenage on the day of my DVD record.
Well played Karma. I look forward to you reclaiming the rest of what I owe in life. Or paying me back what I am owed.
I had a good two hour chat with Adam about his fabulous new book, being in a double act and then going into podcasting and life's insecurities. Even though this was an interview for a two-parter book club I did throw in one emergency question, which he answered brilliantly. We talked about imposter syndrome (I think anyone claiming to have this themselves is actually doing a humblebrag - I feel like I'm an imposter, but obviously I am not really, it's just a syndrome. If you have imposter syndrome then you think you are an imposter, not someone with a syndrome making you feel like one. There are plenty of people who are actual imposters and they keep their mouths shut. Believe me, I know. I've said too much) and then Adam mentioned Central Character syndrome,
https://www.cbtdenver.com/blog/main-character-syndrome. This is less a mental health disorder and more part of the human condition. Inevitably we see ourselves as the star of the film that is our lives. I think many people fail to realise that everyone else also inevitably feels that way, which is getting closer to being a mental health issue. If you start to believe the whole of life is a film and that only your story is important and everyone else are supporting artists, then that's probably a problem.
But I think more of a problem would be if you believed that you were a background artist in your own life. It would be closer to reality - we're all pretty insignificant and if our lives were a film they would be a very long and boring one that could do with a lot of editing (was it really necessary to include all those wanking scenes or to show me every time I went to the toilet) and wouldn't win many awards (apart from ones dedicated to films that were brave enough to show the parts of life that other films shy away from). But if you're living your life not thinking of yourself as one of the main characters then that's maybe worse than believing that you are the most important person on earth and that the only explanation for your existence is that an all powerful superbeing created you.
Poor God. They have to watch every single shitty film of every single life there has ever been, often simultaneously. I doubt they even enjoy it when a character from one film unexpectedly does a cameo in someone else's.
