Curtain

I'm on stage next week. There won't be a curtain, sadly - it's not that kind of theatre. It's a small studio above a very nice pub in Kentish Town, so what it lack in front of stage drapery it makes up for it easily accessed food and drink.

The lack of curtain has led the Director to get awfully excited about format flexibility, so we're doing the play "in the round", with at least some audience on every side. I'm looking forward to the occasional moments where I get confused and start talking to an audience member instead of one of the cast: it really, really, really could happen. 'Intimate' does not begin to describe it.

Hopefully people will not be freaked out by the lack of a veil between them and the actors. The play is a black comedy (or perhaps, for the pretentious amongst you, a "dark farce") about a bunch of self-obsessed, 30-something success-fetishists getting together for a NYE party in a country house in the middle of nowhere. Suffice it to say, it all goes a bit avocado-shaped, given there are hooded figures at the window, myriad lies to be uncovered and something very nasty and sharp lurking in the background. Oh, and Buckaroo. Possibly Twister, too, but that might still be vetoed on the grounds of taste.

Tickets are available here.

Produce

I have a love-hate relationship with avocados.

This is not to be confused with my love-hate relationship with armadillos, who keep hanging around the local bus shelters with their leathery armoured shells scaring the locals but helpfully decimating the troublesome London termite population. Or my love-hate relationship with advocaat which, despite being pleasingly sweet and custardy,  once ran off with a beloved girlfriend of mine and now regularly sends abusive postcards from an expensive holiday home in Mauritius.

No, avocados hold a special place in my heart and my spleen. I love them. I love their distinctive taste, their creamy texture and the fact that - loving them as I do - I then get told by health experts to eat even more of them. This is not something that happens with Irn Bru, and is therefore to be cherished, like a small dog who - although a bit embarassing because he tries to shag your Aunt Betty's leg when she comes to tea and keeps weeing on your CD player - also does your tax returns and forges convincing Jackson Pollocks.

Sadly, however, the Irn Bru analogy can prove useful. Would I like IB so much if when I reached for a bottle and upended it into my mouth, nothing happened? I would lower it, peer into the bottle and sigh. "This Irn Bru isn't ripe", I moan, popping it back into the sunlit window sill to speed the process.

The following day I come back and open the Irn Bru again. Still nothing. This despite the fact it has "ripe and ready" on a sticker across it. I put it back on the shelf.

The next day I'm incredibly busy and get home so late for work I go straight to bed and don't check the bottle.

The next day I reach for the Irn Bru and open it. I pour it into a glass, only to discover it's now gone grey and tastes of dishwater. It goes down the sink.

The avocado: produce that - from my experience - manages to be ripe and edible for about the length of a Peter Jackson movie. Miss this golden window of opportunity in either direction, and you're either crunching a bitter, zombie-green pebble, or a disintegrating, putrid bruise in fruit-form. I've thrown out so many avocados I don't know why I don't just throw them in the skip on the way back from the shops, or better still just beat them to a pulp with a hammer straight after using the self-checkout machine. It would save a lot of heartache.

Of course, trying that on the armadillos gets you nowhere and only annoys them. Hug a Shelly. It's the only way.

Modification

I was very relieved to hear that the Government's badger cull has been delayed for a bit, while highly paid officials decide whether or not it really is a fucking stupid idea. I was not alone in fearing that roving bands of psychopaths with a license to kill things with distinctive streaks of grey hair could lead to a bad end for people of my age.

Of course, unlike the poor old badger, hacking their TB'd lungs into a silk handkerchief as they write poems of loss and despair in their under-siege setts, I can very easily turn to a range of products to disguise myself and throw off the marauding gangs, though I should probably be more careful: a recent habit of going for reddish brown means I put myself at danger of being trampled by horses and eaten by beagles from an illegal hunt.

Dyeing one's hair is a delicate business. As modifications go it's relatively minor - compare painting Just for Men into your stubble to having buttock implants, and suddenly it doesn't seem quite so embarrassing - but I do worry about where it will lead. Assuming my hair doesn't all fall out one day (the genetic jury is out on that one) I don't want to run the risk of ending up like Paul McCartney, looking like my own waxwork replica that's been left to close the radiator overnight. Judging exactly when to stop covering your grey is like to be as complicated as working out when to stop wearing jeans or start becoming a fan of charismatic orchestra conductors.

But at the moment, while I'm relatively confident my skin's elasticity is not such that combining it with dark hair would cause me to look like a victim of a slow-working alien disintegration ray, there's no way I'm allowing grey to have its way. If my hair would just fade respectably, that would be one thing. Instead, my hair is performing some sort of crazy art experiment on my head, a follicular abstract project of uncertain ambition. It's latest triumph is a neat circle of grey just above my right ear, a colourless crop circle that bears no relation to any of the other grey hairs around it. I live in fear that I'll wake up and find that the greys have painted 666 on my hair with impressive neatness.

I might get lucky. Maybe the grand plan is for my hair to delicately outline the location of the unrecovered Brink's-MAT gold bullion. I'll be staring in the mirror with horror, aghast at the salt-and-pepper disaster on my head, when I'll suddenly realise that I'm gazing at a set of coordinates and a crudely drawn picture of Hayward's Heath. I'll race south with a shovel as the coordinates lead me to a Sussex wood, and just as I strike the unmistakable feel of metal buried the soil, I'll be shot and killed by the Government's badger hunters, like the end of Nostromo but with omnivorous mammals.

I think, on balance, I'll keep dyeing it for a while. It's just safer.  

Ladder

I've never worn tights. Well, I say that, when I was 5 my mum concocted what was possibly the most bizarre fancy dress outfit ever to create two "Jubilee Trumpeters", consisting of me and my brother wearing souvenir golden jubilee carrier bags and a pair of white tights (the trumpets were adapted cardboard tinfoil rolls). And I have a vague recollection of there being a pair of yellow tights in the dressing up box in my bedroom when I was little, which would almost certainly have been used to create some sort of superhero get-up at one point. But, APART FROM THAT, I have never worn tights.

They have always struck me as a curiously impractical garment. Any clothing item which breaks the very first time you wear it, and provokes more of a "oh well, that was bad luck" rather than a scream of "fucking bastards, I'm taking these back" might as well be replaced with tissue paper and roll of Sellotape. Or perhaps a form of pasta.

Life, however, throws plenty of tights substitutes at the unwary male. Or at least this unwary male (and there must be few more unwary than I). Most durable to date are my cycling leggings. Well, actually, they're not cycling leggings at all, they're cheap-as-chips running leggings from purveyors of bargain shite Sports Direct. But I wear them when cycling, and thus far they have proved impressively durable, despite my tendency to forget to unzip the ankle looseners when I take them off: I end up hopping around with stretchy leggings attached to my foot as I try to pull them off, like a pixie attached to a piece of chewing gum.

(It's amazing how bothered people can be about how others dress - read this thread as a prime example of hot-under-the-collar-fuckwittery)

Most fragile seems to be the ultimate in male tights-substitute, the skinny jean. Despite clearly being a young persons trouser (and therefore out of bounds to angora wearing oldies)  I can't resist building my entire wardrobe around the Skinny.  Perhaps it's a reaction to spending most of my twenties wearing baggy clothes to hide how skinny I (thought that I) was. Perhaps I secretly just want to wander around in tights for some reason*. Perhaps I'm having a mid-life crisis and can't afford a sports car, a jet-ski or a giant, ceramic replica of Jeremy Clarkson.

But Skinnies, it turns out, are a bit on the tissue-paper-and-pasta side. They don't ladder, as such, but I've never worn through any leg wear as quickly as a work through my tiny jeans. It might be that, despite being determinedly on the slim side, I'm just not quite the right shape for them. They are clearly not - for instance - designed for the frequent cyclist. Not only does wearing them while actually cycling lead to worn-through holes in very embarrassing places (stemming from friction of taut denim against saddle) but if you've got thighs and a bum you're going to have to be careful when bending. There's really not a lot of give. Bending at the knees might look after your back when heavy lifting; it doesn't do much for your trousers, and the subsequent journey home on the tube can be awkward.

Maybe I should look into tights after all. And maybe a carrier bag.

S.

*I'm thinking more from the actory side of things than being a transvestite, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Sake

It is indicative of just how drink obsessed I am at the moment that rather than reading this as 'purpose' or 'benefit' I thought instead of a Japanese rice-based alcohol. But then I got over that and remembered that I don't really drink rice based liquor and wouldn't have anything to say about it other than:
I'd like to go to Japan one day.

It's amazing what you can do with rice. I wonder if you can also build a helicopter out of it?

 Japan suffers in my travel plans because of its determinedly northern hemisphere persuasions. I'm sure it regularly cries with anguish about the missed opportunities of being north of the equator and missing out on visits by cricket-loving Brits. If you're going to have a summer at exactly the same time as my summer, frankly you're just not trying hard enough to get my attention. Who works out your scheduling?

 A friend has just said "this time next week it'll be 4:30". So it's going to be dark at the end of the working day instead of just relentlessly gloomy (and right now there's a strange whispy but vast layer of blackish cloud drifting damply underneath the usual smooth grey shell of the autumn sky, as if someone somewhere has set fire to a whale), and this is the point where my motivation to flee the country comes into sharp focus. But Japan? It's single saving grace for a winter holiday would be going to those hot pools that always feature in David Attenborough shows and watching red-faced monkeys kick the shit out of each other in pursuit of a good bath. So, for my own sake, I need some light, some sunshine and - should I not get them - some rice-based liquor and a slice of cake. I'll take what I can get.

Shakiness

Sometimes I don't get hungry. Of course, this happens to everyone, but that's normally because, for instance, they've just eaten a massive cake just before the girl jumps out and have eaten her as well (leading to an expensive public inquiry), or because someone once served them a cocktail with liquid nitrogen and now they don't have a stomach (for fuck's sake).

No, sometimes I don't get hungry even though I haven't eaten for ages. The first I know about the fact that actually I'm a couple of meals short of a picnic is when the end of my nose turns slightly numb and I come over a bit indistinct until I eat a samosa or something. It's the only time I ever consider eating a Mars Bar, a confection almost perfectly designed to be unappetising. Looking as it does like a small bit of fungally infected wood and tasting sweeter than the stench of a dead mouse under the floorboards, Mars' crowning glory is the way they've made the chocolate so sticky that I have to clean my teeth about five times before I stop spitting brown like a chewing-tobacco addicted cowboy. At least Coco-Pops only turn the milk brown.

Anyway, that's all rather beside the point. I have no idea why my stomach sometimes decides it can't be bothered to alert me to the fact that I should, in fact, have eaten a cheese sandwich several hours ago and am now on the verge of catatonia. It's a bit like having a car with a malfunctioning fuel light that works some of the time, so that not only do you not have any idea how much fuel you've got, you forget to keep track of it because on the last three occasions everything was working just fine.

It's potentially awkward, since I tend not to have much food in the house. This is because I have a slightly erratic lifestyle and there's no guarantee I'm going to be home at mealtimes, so if I buy perishables they tend to, well, perish. So I live hand to mouth - or rather, Morrison's to mouth - leaving the very real possibility of forgetting to eat and then having to crawl shakily on my hands and knees to the nearest corner shop so they can sell me an overpriced flapjack.

In fact surely you'd have to be on the verge of starvation to buy one of their flapjacks, and yet they seem to have quite an acceptable turnover* of them. Which makes me wonder if there are not hordes of shakiness-beset Londoners crawling into convenience stores across town forking out £2 for a life-giving square of stickiness. I may not be alone after all.

* or possibly an acceptable flapjack of turnovers

Fascist

Yesterday I may have upset a funny man.

It's entirely possible that he might actually be quite funny, though I confess I have not expended a great deal of effort finding out. I spotted a RT which went thusly:

“Given the physical restrictions of ET's species, in order to build spaceships etc, they must have mastered a slave race”

After a brief moment of appreciation of the iconoclastic audacity of the tweet, I paused and thought: hang on – the film goes to great lengths to show exactly how ET’s race overcomes their physical limitations (telekinesis, multi-purpose glowing digits, that sort of thing), which rather spoils the joke. I retweeted it again, adding “> bullshit” as a coda.

I’d intended to explain myself, but I got distracted. So my hard-line joke-analysis sat unexplained on Twitter, until the joke’s progenitor spotted it and replied:

“Cheers. Nice to know a joke is still appreciated.”

So now I feel really bad, as if I’ve been caught being some sort of geeky humour-fascist. Though now I’m wondering what a geeky humour-fascist would look like – perhaps a uniform, Jarvis Cocker specs and a nose that lights up? Not a red one, a real one, but with a small LED horribly inserted in their nasal canal. They are fascists after all.

A sense of humour is a precious thing. Its absence has imperilled the career of England’s Kevin Pietersen, and of course it’s widely accepted to be a prerequisite for every woman who’s ever pursued love through classified ads or internet dating*. Scientists have also discovered that you can produce electricity equivalent to a medieval waterwheel by plugging seven clowns into a Speak & Spell. Basically, a sense of humour is vital, but a bit like a hamstring: you never think about it until it starts to stiffen up. Except that’s not entirely true. For a start no-one has ever got punched in the face or persecuted by the Daily Mail because someone thought their hamstring was off-colour.  And secondly, I suspect people think about their sense of humour quite a lot, just probably not in a very realistic way.

As Marie says in When Harry Met Sally: ‘Everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humour but they couldn't possibly all have good taste.’ And presumably they can’t all have a sense of humour. How many British people would own up to not having a sense of humour? It would be akin to saying “Hi, I like kitten death”, or “I still love Jimmy Saville”. But why should it be so impossible to imagine someone proudly saying, “Hello, I’m Geoffrey. I’m extremely intelligent, work in Great Ormond Street saving the lives of cute children, I climbed Kilimanjaro last year for Marie Curie Cancer Care and I haven’t understood a single joke told to me since 1986”? 

Fair enough, I’d have gone off him for the appalling boasting long before we got to the sense of humour part.

 

So, am I losing my sense of humour? Do I have to worry about it in the same way I worry about losing my hair? Do people get less humorous? According to the University of Glasgow, this happens from about 52 years old. Some clever Americans think that grandparents just can’t spot a joke. I’m just waiting for the research that says all over 65s want to invite Jim Davidson round for tea to listen to his charming views on social equality while offering him some knitted cake. Losing your sense of humour looks like a real threat. Whether that’s worse than losing hair or, say, liver function is probably a moot point, but it certainly lends yet more terror to the ageing process – as if it needed it.

Then again, some of this research compares the reaction of old people to teenagers, suggesting yet again that there’s a correlation between having a sense of humour and laughing uncontrollably at BBC3 shit starring Will Mellor. I’m not particularly convinced of that. Maybe the grumpy old bastards just got discerning on your ass.

* Do men – in general - also seek GSOH? Or are they faintly terrified at the possibility that their date might be funnier than them? 

PS: For a more serious take on recent instances of Comedy Fascism, here's Rufus Hound