Days without alcohol 42
The staff of Caffe Nero know me well by now. I am usually in there at some point most days and they know what I like - a grande skinny latte. Sometimes though they don't have skimmed milk, so I usually go for a green tea or filter coffee then. Yesterday, they asked me if I wanted the usual and when I said yes and reminded them it was a skinny, one of them shouted out - "No skimmed milk!"
"Oh, I'll have a green tea then," I said.
"Ha ha, no only kidding," said the serving girl, "We have skimmed milk really!"
These are the kinds of crazy japes we get up to down the old Caffe Nero. It's pretty much a laugh a minute. They wouldn't be able to josh around with any old customer. This prank proved that they see me as one of their own. Jeremy Beadle would be proud.
I sat and had my skinny latte before heading to the gym. I found myself thinking about breathing. It's something we generally take for granted. You can go for months, even years without even really noticing that you're breathing and then suddenly thinking about it can suddenly seem a bit odd, surreal even. You are probably thinking about it now, for the first time for ages. And once you're conscious of this act that we all take for granted, I bet the first thing you did was take an almost sarcastically big breath in order to emphasise how the process works, a kind of reverse whistle through your lips rather than the more nonchalant almost imperceptible slight sniff through the nose - now you're done a performed version of the nasal breath.
Isn't it strange how something so important so quickly becomes part of the background process of living. Yet if you think about what is happening it's a bit of a mind fuck. We spend out lives swimming around in this massive pool made up of invisible gases, which we then suck into our lungs where we somehow extract oxygen out of it and expel carbon dioxide back into it and somehow all this keeps us alive and makes our body work. It's freaky. If all the gas suddenly disappeared out into space we'd soon stop taking this nasal grazing for granted and really become aware of the whole gaseous exchange.
It would be an odd world if we had to keep thinking about this, but it's kind of odd that we don't think about it except when the supply is about to run out. Enjoy your invisible soup. It's quite important apparently.
And then I left the cafe and headed to the gym and forgot all about it again, even after a 30+ minute run when I was gasping for air.
We had a great evening recording two episodes of Banter. It didn't feel like over a year since the last time we did this, but there had been a hiatus of that length between series two and series three (my second series three in the space of a couple of months - what's going on?). I really love doing this show and at it's best it's like a chat you'd have done the pub with your mates, if your mates were extremely funny comedians like Arthur Smith, Dave Gorman, Russell Howard, Jenny Eclair and Dilly Keane. Even Andrew Collings has his moments. It's stupid and flippant, but also covers so interesting moral and emotional areas. It's on the radio in April, but we're recording four more in the next few weeks, so if you're down in London or nearby, why not come along to a recording. You get about an hour of extra chat per show, which is usually the funniest stuff, but is too rude or contentious to be broadcast on Radio 4. I enjoyed it anyway and as always, that is the main thing. Gotta go to bed now - on the XFM breakfast show in the morning. No rest for the wicked. Or the abstemious.
