Every woman in Harpenden seems to be pregnant. I don't know if this as a direct result of my recent move here or whether it was like this before and there's just something in the water (semen presumably - semen that is capable of surviving being emerged in stomach acid and has the ability to bore through the digestive tract and find its way to the ovaries), but everywhere I looked today there was a baby bump. Almost as if all I had to do was look at a woman and she'd become pregnant. I am still pretty sexy, as the woman asking me my name in Starbucks proved, and it's nice to know that my potency knows no bounds, but I have a wedding to pay for and I can't afford the paternity suits that will come with this as soon as the women of Harpenden make the connection.
Or maybe it's just that, just as old people go to Bournemouth to die, fertile women come to Harpenden to breed. As well as gestating foetuses there are also a whole load of prams and toddlers and snot-nosed schoolkids, in their grubby afternoon faces, running like cheetahs, willingly to home (or cycling to the bike ramps in the park). Never has so much sexcrement been put on public display (without causing public outcry) - it's dripping from every corner of the town. This place is more fertile than the tip of the Cerne Abbas Giant's massive dong. So come here quick if you want to have a baby (though as I am getting married, I can only personally offer to look you pregnant).
Will I be able to survive five months in this town without becoming pregnant myself? And is that why the tailor is going to need to take out my wedding suit trousers after all? If I conceive a child in this place then I will have to do a Beckham and name them from where they first started sprouting. Harpenden Herring has a nice ring. For a boy or a girl. So that's that sorted.
Maybe when I finally lose my virginity on my wedding night (my mum reads this) then I too can join this never ending throng of replicants, churning out ever more mouths and arseholes to gobble up all resources and then cover the earth in faeces. There's a line for the wedding speech.
I bummed around today (the most effective birth control), getting little done. There is much to do, but sunshine and weariness are a difficult combination to fight. I cycled into town, though chickened out of going to the ramps in the park and drank coffee and baffled the local shopgirls with my Scottish currency. Almost like no one from here has ever travelled. Maybe it's like some kind of Star Trek planet where everyone stays the same age as long as they never leave the environs.
And tonight, for the first time in ages (excluding work and times I have been there alone on tour) I went to the pub. I had a pint of bitter in the snug at the Cross Keys pub. It reminded me of teenage nights back in Somerset in the early 1980s where this was all we had to do. The carpet and the tables and the tiny room were all the same and so were the smells (minus the pervasive stench of tobacco). The simple things seem ridiculously luxurious at the moment. But it also showed me how my focus in life has changed. For years the pub was my main venue for entertainment, but now it's a rarity. I thought of those days when I would regularly down six pints without it really touching the sides and felt comfortable in my middle age, nursing my one pint and chatting with my nearly wife, wondering if she was inadvertently drinking some of Harpenden's burrowing jism wine and would soon fall victim to the town's blessing or curse and we'd never be able to leave, lest we all crumble to dust at the town limits.
My
latest Metro article came out today,, which I managed to turn into a mini advert for my upcoming Radio 4 Charity appeal for SCOPE. If you want to make a one-off or monthly donation to this brilliant charity
then you can do so here. And if you don't do it for the charity then do it for me. I want to break the record for the highest ever total for the Radio 4 appeal. That's the big issue here, so don't let me down.
I was quite pleased with myself because I'd managed to get three Metro columns ahead, but now I've used up my store and have to do another two by next Tuesday. Jesus, the days are flying by.
And another big name guest added to the
The Leicester Square Theatre Podcast. My guest on 21st May will be the brilliant Charlie Higson. Tickets for Minchin and Lee are nearly all gone, so book now if you want to see Charlie. There will be more names to follow.
