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I had to take my car in for an MOT today and stayed in the dealership to try and work whilst they got on with their more proper jobs, but I didn’t get too much done. My second draft (really a total rewrite) of my script is not progressing quickly enough and am at the stage where I just want to give up writing forever. We know how it goes. But still every time I believe that it’s not going to happen this time. And one time I will be right. Probably this time.
It’s made worse by the fact that the space bar on my crappy Apple laptop chooses to stop working about half the time. And I don’t have time to take it in to get fixed. But if I took it in to get fixed I’d have twice the time because I wouldn’t have to keep going back to press the space bar.
They sent me a video of the underside of my car - everything was fine, it’s just part of the service - and this would be great if I was the kind of person who got sexually aroused by an undercarriage. But I don’t. And anyone who says I do is lying. It just made me think of the different perspective on life a car mechanic has, looking at cars from underneath.
It took a bit longer than I expected, but they valeted my car, which was very welcome, so I drove it straight to Waitrose to see if the horrible man from a few days ago would walk past and congratulate me on the exemplary cleanliness of my number plate. But he was nowhere to be seen, the fucking hypocrite.
I struggled to get any work done all afternoon, which was annoying as my script work is now about to collide with the start of all the podcasts. I thought I had ages to read Sathnam Sanghera’s book and listen to Jon Ronson’s podcasts and find out how to say Emily Atack’s surname, but now it’s nearly fucking February.
But aside from work all is going well. My daughter wanted me to go to sleep on her pillow at bedtime and I hugged her for a bit and she told me she loved me (still very rare occurrences and she’d just been saying how she only loved her mum at bath time). “Don’t tell anyone,” I told her.
“I can’t fib,” she lied.
But man, the heady happiness of lying beside this little idiot for a few minutes. She pretend to snore and we both giggled. Most of parenting is a relentless piss in the wind (sometimes literally), but moments like this you reach the zenith of human existence.
A really excellent, funny and slightly harrowing podcast with one of my absolute heroes, Terry Hall.
Listen here
And remember the whole shebang is starting up again - still some tickets to Wolverhampton on Friday. And a handful just added to Birmingham on 23rd March. And Leicester Square shows starting on 4th Feb with Jon Ronson and Emily Atack.
