thinking ...

about ends and beginnings

My tour finished last friday. Originally it started in January, at the beginning of this year, I had a three month break over the summer and got back on the road in September.

I finished in Warwick, at the Arts centre which is on the university campus. There are three venues on this site, small, bigger and biggest. I was playing the bigger room, Rob Beckett, was simulteaneously playing the biggest room, the combination of both audiences caused a tail back out of the car park. I caught sight of him on the monitor in the green room during my interval, onstage his trainers were gleaming.

It was a good gig, afterwards the young sound technician, told me how much he’d enjoyed it, he said ‘I didnt think it would resonate with me but it did’. I felt weepily grateful, I want everyone to love my work, thats why I’m a stand up.

I wont be touring for a while, Ive done two big tours since the end of Covid, the first, 60 FFS was delayed because I turned 60 in 2020 and lock down cancelled pushed everything into 2021. When it finally got on the road there were months of masked audiences as everyone tried to make the best of it, it seems like a fever dream now.

By 2023, 60 FFS had played every venue that could squeeze me in- the live circiuit bulges with talent btw, we are all on the road because there is fuck all work for us in telly land, correction, there is fuck all work for most of us in telly land! This is how the cookie crumbles, but it can turn on a sixpence, luck is like a coin that comes out of your ear.

After 60FFS I was going to write another novel, my seventh, I tried so hard, maybe too hard, my mother had died and I felt rudderless and mad, I had a new grandson and a chest infection that sat like a sofa on my lungs. I was in no fit state to write a novel, my agent suggested to my publishers that i might write a memoir instead? Happily they agreed and I was able to spend the rest of that year, sifting through my past, it was a priviledge. The memoir ended up being a love letter to my parents, siblings and family, but it is also a love/ hate letter to my career.

More love than hate, but quite a lot of resentment, I have always been jealous of other people’s success, i thought Id have grown out of it by now, and I have to some extent, but i still have pangs of terrible envy. I came in at a hard time for women, I started gigging as a punk poet in manchester in 1980 and moved to London in 82 where, between waitressing gigs, I jumped onto the very early comedy/cabaret pub circuit, the rowdy, heckling, pissed audience years.

I joke that back then it was illegal for two women to share the same bill on the same night because it was genuinely believed that the entire audience would start menstruating. Mixed bills only became legal in the late 80’s. Its not true, but occasionally it felt like it.

All the stuff about gigging is in the book, gigging, having a baby , winning a big prize, behaving badly, being successful but never quite making it in my head, 45 years of it.

45 years of stand up and writing books and radio shows and Grumpy old women and touring, touring, touring. Im great at touring, i have touring skills, i know where the decent motorway services are, I know never to travel without an emergency sandwich, I know to collect more disposable cutlery than i need, most crucially, i know how to be on time, how to operate any microwave in the land and to approach all unfamiliar ironing boards and irons with caution.

I know when prepping a show there are eggy gigs, its part of the process, i know I will not sleep until i like the show enough to play with it, I know how to pace myself so that i have enough petrol for the second half, I know, i know, i know.

What I dont know now, is when i will tour again, the week before the last ‘Jokes, Jokes, Jokes’ gig, I got a letter from the DWP, inviting me to apply for my pension.

Dont you know who I am ! Obviously they do.

I turn 66 in march, its my turn. Obviously Im not retiring, comics dont retire, none of us have got proper pensions, thats why we got into comedy, to get away from that kind of stuff.

I am hoping to pick up the book i was trying write when Ma died, the characters keep knocking on my sub-cooncious, I feel ready to let them in. I also feel ready to spend a bit more time at home, the old man is knocking on, he’s seventy-seven, he needs regular sausage meals and walks around the park. I need to look after myself, i need to swim again, even though I cant be arsed, I want to keep supple. I paint these days and we look after our grandson which is an undeserved bonus for me, having neglecting his mother when she was his age. A three year old is magical, he is so like her, I feel like Im being allowed another chance.

But i will always need to gig, I cant imagine not walking through stage doors and turning the lights on around the mirrors in the dressing room, this is my habitat. This is my world and it means everything to me, but for the moment, Im taking a bit of time to breathe and think and plot, we planted next years tulips today, life goes on.