Ooooh, so close to a sell out tonight. Maybe 25 ticket sales away from a full house. It was a shame not to end up with one sold out show, but thank goodness things picked up a bit for these last two weeks. And to look at it in more positive terms about 375 people paid to come and see me tonight. I'd be very pleased with that even if I hadn't also done 24 other performances in the same town.
Lessons learned though. Next time I will take my holiday at the start of January and probably just do a three week run. Apparently I sold more tickets for this year's London run than I did for the last. So that's one positive to take from all this. Though I did do three more weeks.
I got through this five week run with no booze and even more impressively no chocolate (after the initial week). In Edinburgh and with AIOTM (aiotm) I have felt the need to eat loads to give me the energy to continue and overcome my tiredness. But it turns out that I can get through a stressful time without these delicious crutches. I am glad to say that the show has developed quite substantially since the beginning of the run and there was some fun messing around tonight, though stupidly I again forgot to get a recording of the performance so will probably forget all the new stuff by the time I start up again in Canterbury in a month. But don't worry - I'll just make up another load of cool new stuff. Tonight I adlibbed an interesting conversation in which Jesus took the credit for scripting all the ad-libbed stuff, which made me wonder if all of history was pre-planned, in which case how can God punish us for following the script?
The refinement of the show continues and it's interesting (to me at least) how tiny things can make a joke work better. I can't quite remember when I changed it, but the line about my dad winning the Cheddar Man of the Year award originally read "That's harder to get than it sounds. You don't get that any more for just not throwing your excrement at visitors." This would get a laugh, but by changing the word "visitors" to "tourists" (meaning almost the same thing, but slightly more precisely) it goes much better. Interesting hey? No, not really. I wonder what other changes and improvements and disimprovements will be made by the end of May.
And earlier in the day it had been a much happier and more enjoyable 6Music show than last week's nadir. After last week's successful alphabet created from food we asked our listeners to send in punctuation marks and numbers in food too, so we could perhaps make up our own food based font. But looking at the number 8 that someone had made out of an avocado (I think) brought back memories for us both. Andrew recalled the first time he saw an avocado (in London in the 1990s - what a change it must have made from his Northampton soot) which prompted me to remember the delicious vinegrette dressing my mother used to make to put in the middle of a halved and destoned avocado. But away from the food the number 8 had an especial significance for me. It reminded me of being about 6 or 7 and my dad being disappointed in me. My father is a man for whom academic achievement is possibly the most important thing on earth, maybe more important than love or happiness. In his Golden Wedding speech he summed up all his three children only in terms of what they had achieved in education: for myself that was to have persuaded him to buy a multi-volume History of Britain, on the understanding that I would read a chapter a day during my year off so that I could go to University knowing everything - but I got part way through the first chapter and got bored and never read any of the rest of the series (they are in my bookcase at least).
Dad had studied mathematics at Manchester University and got a first, so maths was maybe more important to him than all the other disciplines. I remember him being disappointed at my inability to add without use of my fingers at an early age. But this morning I recalled (though dimly) how he had been more perturbed by my childish inability to be able to write a proper grown-up number 8 in a single stroke of the pen. The best I could do was to cheat and draw one circle on top of another to make a cartoon snowman 8, but he unimpressed. Why could I not draw an 8 in one fluid movement? Was there something wrong with me? Would I have to be sent away to a special school for the educationally disappointing?
I was moved by this paternal disapproval and like all young boys harboured the desire to get affirmation from my father, to live up to his high hopes for me and I have a hazy recollection of sitting in the cupboard under the stairs in our Loughborough home, attempting to master the execution of this difficult to write number. I tried again and again on the same piece of paper, but though my mind could see what I was meant to be creating my artless hand was playing no part in it. The best I could do was an 8 that had fallen over on its side. I couldn't get it to stand up. I suppose I could have turned the paper around, but that wouldn't work unless the figure 8 was the only one on the page. My 8s were lying down, they had given up on me, they were lazy and underachieving like me. I did not realise then that I was magically transforming one of the lowest numbers into the highest and was writing infinities over and over again. That might have felt like an achievement. I would have been the cleverest 6 year old in Leicestershire if I could only have known this and said I was doing it on purpose. And maybe I could have managed to draw 8s by consciously trying to draw infinities. Ah well, too late now.
I was ashamed. I had wanted to make my dad proud, or at least just not ashamed, but I kept failing. I fancy the paper was soggy with my tears and the the biro infinites started to blur and wash away.
I don't know when I managed to pick my 8s up off the ground, nor am I sure that we actually had an understairs cupboard or that even if we did that I spent my time hiding in there like some miserable and unfortunate J K Rowling character who had been badly copied off a Roald Dahl character.
I turned out to be somewhat adept at maths, and did 2 A levels in it and was going to study it at University, before an almost too late epiphany made me change my mind and do History instead (this prompted me to change subjects from Physics to English Lit midway through the first term of Sixth Form, though I carried on with the maths). I wonder if I persisted so long at the subject and nearly made the disastrous and life-changing decision to do it at University because somewhere inside me was that little boy who couldn't draw 8s but wanted to impress his dad. Who knows? I can write 8s now though dad, and sometimes add up in my head. Do you love me yet? Please don't lock me back in the cupboard under the stairs. I hope Hagrid will come and rescue me and that I am the chosen one and then you'll see.
