Travel with my Bag

I was in London recently and just love getting time with my pals and catching up. Also getting the chance to do The Set List show at Soho theatre was just absolutely amazing. It’s a show where the minute you step onstage you are handed a piece of paper that tells you the subjects your gig will be based on. It’s a bit like jumping off a cliff naked in front of the people you desperately want to impress and have your period at the exact moment you bend your knees to leap off the edge. If you have ever had that dream you are naked and can’t use the buttons of a phone to get out of the street filled with people staring at you? Then that’s the feeling The Set List gives you and the only way out is to talk funny and make people laugh to get you out of the situation. I did it.

Monica my dear pal cheered and laughed all the way through and gave me a big hug as I walked off stage and thanks to Paul Provenza & the Set List team for the chance to do the show again.

I do love a walk down Oxford Street to see all the bright Christmas lights and look in the windows and feel that wonderful seasonal excitement. Though we don’t really do much Christmas stuff now that Ashley our daughter is a fully fledged adult- I do miss the feeling and get nostalgic at rosy cheeked kids in red mittens all giggling queuing up for Santa photos.

The other weird thing is when am doing Christmas comedy gigs, and the all jingle Christmas songs are on....I quickly realise that all these songs I was singing to in the 80s were out when most of the staff weren’t even alive. I am old. That’s official.

Christmas gigs can be notoriously difficult as people get raging drunk and have no interest in your funny stories....there is nothing better to bring down your comedy swaggering ego than to stand onstage and get whacked by a turkey breast on the shin bone as you almost reach a punch line.

Just a head’s up to people being dragged to a comedy night at Christmas party works night out, if you don’t like comedy and hate shutting up- just refuse to go and if you are a drunken person that hates comedy and likes throwing food? Please stay at home and whack yourself with a ham in private.

This time of year in Glasgow the drink and party season is in full swing, I watched two girls in astonishingly high platform shoes (that actually looked like surgical wear) hold onto each other trying to cross a road and fall like timber in front of moving cars.

Luckily they crawled onto the pavement dragging their Lulu Guinness bags and Jimmy Choo’s onto the vomit spewed pavement. One of them had a black hair piece that fell out and washed away in the gutter and she scrambled on bloodied knees trying to save it from going down the drain. Classy.

The other phenomenon on freezing winter nights in Scotland is the sheer amount of young men and women who refuse to wear a jacket, the two drunken girls I just mentioned were in thin shiny fabric off the shoulder dresses, it was 2 degrees below freezing in Glasgow. I don’t ever recall going out disco dancing in the late 70s and thinking “it’s snowing out there am going to find a sleeveless short dress and ditch my winter coat”.

Maybe I am old now and this is the way old people talk, but seeing young guys in thin tee shirts standing in the snow literally shivering and trembling with mild hypothermia makes me wonder- what makes them do that? Do you not get laid if you own a jacket nowadays? Is that a new code- wear a coat never get fucked? When did that happen?

My other bug bear is fragrance adverts on TV at this time, I really don’t understand them especially if you watch them with sound on mute. It basically is a woman in a torn billowing frock with smudged eye makeup running down an alley then caressing the bricks and staring into the distance- she looks sexually assaulted but then she sticks her fingers in her mouth and a cat jumps off a trash can and she stares at the moon and then clutches a bottle of perfume? What the fuck is that about?

So here we are almost at the end of the year and my blog is becoming more and more sporadic – I am feeling weird about life. Another year gone and I still don’t know where my career or life is going; shouldn’t I have all this shit figured out by now?

No is the answer, I don’t know much at all despite getting to this age. I only know when its cold- wear a jacket.