My mum and dad have come to the big city for the weekend, dragging chaos in their wake, being rude to fat people on tube trains and saying offensive things too loudly in restaurants. But mainly being lovely. This is where tubeman gets it from though clearly. I am only in my forties and find London bewildering despite having lived here for over half my life, so no wonder these country bumpkins in their seventies are a bit overwhelmed. Someone should write a sitcom about them. Believe me, I have tried.
I took them out to lunch today and they've packed a lot into their three days here. Seeing two shows (not Christ on a Bike - no need to go mad, plus unlike Warhorse and The Lion King
it's on in Cheddar anyway), going to museums and art galleries and doing a bit of shopping. It was nice to buy them lunch and I think the £50 I spent on that more than makes up for all the work they did bringing me up. After all I never asked to be born.
It was a day off for me, which for once, (blog aside) I managed to keep work free. I am very much looking forward to my holiday where I get to escape the madness for a whole fortnight. It's been a very full on year and I think part of the reason I am frazzled and burned out at the moment is that I've hardly had any time to myself. The Central Line was closed down so I decided to walk home, doing a bit of shopping along the way. I almost convinced myself that I needed to buy a small Macbook Air, to work on when I am out and about (even though that is what I bought my iPad for). Though it is a beautiful and compact computer I saw sense (for the moment). But then again I haven't bought any Apple product at all this year. When you put it like that, chucking away the best part of a grand on something that I don't really need, but would really like, seems almost reasonable. My girlfriend laughed in my face when I told her later. "It would make me work harder on my writing," I told her.
"For about a week, until you looked for another excuse why you're not getting anything done," she told me.
How does she know me so well?
Instead I went to look for a couple of pairs of proper grown up shoes. I only have trainers (apart from the fancy special occasion spats that I wore on Celebrity Mastermind) and now I am wearing suits most of the time that looks a bit stupid. Dr Who might be able to pull it off, but he wouldn't have been able to if he had been in his William Hartnell incarnation. Which is the one I increasingly am closest to in age (and yes I know it's "The Doctor" and that he's hundreds of years old - but consider Dr Who nerds that he is also made up and created to entertain children). I was in Selfridges where most swanky shoes cost between £150 and £350. I picked up a pair of very handsome black shoes to discover that they cost a staggering £800. I could almost buy a Macbook Air for that and I wouldn't be going around with the computer on my feet, scuffing it up on the floor. I thought as I put them down that by not buying them I had now saved enough money to buy a new laptop. This is how my mind works. How long do you think I am going to hold out from making this unnecessary and slightly sickening purchase?
I managed to find two pairs of shoes that didn't cost quite that much, though was disappointed that for my money I didn't even get to put my foot in one of those machines which accurately measured your size with moving metal blocks. Buying shoes used to be so much more fun when I was little.
They didn't even ask me if I wanted to wear the new shoes home. They just put them in a bag.
And then tonight we went to see "The King's Speech" which was enjoyable enough, although everyone had been going on about it so much that my expectations had been raised a little high. Nice to see a film telling an actual story and for that story to be one that we probably hadn't heard before. Great performances and a combination of playing a royal with a disability (albeit a minor one) must surely make my pal Colin Firth (I sat behind him at the pantomime which makes us best buds) a dead cert for the Oscar. It's certainly worth seeing and made me keen to get on with writing my own film about Rasputin's killer which hopefully will also get me one of the Os in my COBNOB. If I can't get the full COBNOB, then having an Oscar as the only award I ever win would be an even more impressive achievement (although the Nobel prize part of the COBNOB is perhaps a bit of a stretch).
Not that I am setting my sights impossibly high. And it won't happen if I don't have that Macbook Air to write it on. In the old days I used to buy a new pad as a way to motivate myself to start a new project and my house has many many pads with just two or three pages written on and sometimes none. I should probably learn from that. Or just buy a new pad for my Rasputin film. Which will be less of a waste of money, but a waste of money nonetheless.
