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Last full day of the holiday and went to settle up this afternoon. They gave me a print up of what I’d spent and what I’d got for free. Had I beaten the system and got more booze and ice cream than I had paid for? No I had not. We had missed by some distance. There was still the afternoon, evening and early morning to go. If we made a night of it and illegally bought drinks for other people at the hotel, then maybe, just maybe we could do this.
But I think we only managed another (quite impressive given it was all for us) 50 euros. It took us a bit closer to the target, but even taking into account the fact that we didn’t have to pay for our beach towels either, I think we had over paid by at least 100 euros.
You won this time hotel. But I bet you very rarely do.
Which is why they are not doing all inclusive next year.
Had I been twenty years younger and so had my kids, then I could have drunk that bar dry. But never mind. I am proud of myself for, for once in my life, not feeling I have to consume everything if it is “free”.
The week has gone by so fast and I have achieved nothing, except connecting with my children. And what use is that to anyone? In the old days holidays were my reading time and I’d often get through a book a day. Good luck with that with two kids. But although there were opportunities to get a little bit of book time in this time round, I didn’t even open a book, except on holiday when I read a bit of “DIdn’t You Kill My Mother-in-Law?” by Roger Wilmut about the alternative comedy boom. Some very interesting stuff about the early days of the comedy store - though I might have been a bit unfair about Keith Allen’s public school experience in previous blogs (yet I see the other day he had the gall to criticise a vandal for smashing his wife’s restaurant’s window and demanding an apology - still waiting 30 years for any sign of regret for him vandalising our revue show).
I have mainly been on my phone or computer and got back on to Twitter a bit. And a few people said I shouldn’t be tweeting on holiday. But it’s a fun way to pass the time without being too distracting and in a way I wonder if the truth is that I shouldn’t be tweeting when I am meant to be working. Obviously it’s quite hard to delineate social media and work for me, as they are quite intertwined.
I remember Graham Linehan saying that he reads way more now than he used to, because of the internet. But it’s short things rather than books. And that’s true. The internet leads you to information and misinformation about so many things. I lost half an hour this week to reading up on one of my mini-obsessions, the Turin Shroud to see if there was anything about the somewhat unlikely theory that I once read a book about that Leonardo da Vinci had created the shroud (even though it is recorded have having existed long before his birth.
I quite admire the author for managing to get that one off the ground. And making a book out of it. Books are just as full of shit as the internet.
But work is now looming its ugly head. I haven’t gigged since the start of June and have done minimal other work since then and it’s been a delight (though passed way too quickly and I have failed to get the other stuff I wanted to do done), but I will have to get back into it on Monday. I still have to write most of Relativity (which we’re recording in November) and today got a call about another potential job that will take up the whole of the second half of September (could be good though). Why didn’t I do a bit of work on Relativity when I had the chance? Because I am a dick. And always will be.
