Packing up all my possessions so the builders can do their stuff is a monumental task. This morning I had a go at clearing out the cellar and an under stairs cupboard that I haven't really even looked in since I dumped some stuff in there when I moved in in 2003.
Recently a man put in new smoke alarms, but one of them was poorly placed so that it blocked this cupboard door. It seemed that the bottom part of the smoke alarm was meant to be detachable but no matter which way I pushed or pulled it, it stayed attached. All I succeeded in doing was to make the smoke alarm go into some kind of mode where it let out a single beep every minute or so. It was annoying.
My fiancée was able to squeeze through the small crack in the door and hand out boxes or sometimes individual items and we cleared the cupboard that way, with an annoying beep punctuating our work like a very lazy metronome.
Most of the stuff in there went straight in the bin or the recycling. There was my collection of Viz magazine from the mid-80s. They were a bit worse for wear and (hopefully) too late to be collectors' items so I dumped them. They had survived for so long and given me so many laughs, but I had to be brutal. My fiancée found an old Valentine's card from a previous girlfriend. It was signed with a question mark and I wasn't entirely sure who it was from. It seemed unduly sentimental to keep an essentially anonymous card and so that once-heart-felt sentiment went into the recycling, just like our doomed love.
An old encyclopaedia from a time when information was not at our fingertips at any phone or computer also got dumped- a vestige of things past- along with some old landline phones, similarly surpassed in the time they had lain in this dark, damp hole. An old Stewart Lee poster of a whale fighting a massive phallus surprised my girlfriend and made me laugh at its graphicness, especially given the fact that four years ago Stewart had lightly chastised me for having a poster that nearly had the word, "fuck" on it.
In another cupboard I found some comedy costumes from the 20th century, including the shirt I had worn in my 1st Edinburgh Fringe in the 7 Raymonds show, my Big Daddy costume from TMWRNJ and all the Fijian outfits from "It's not the End of the World". Everything was creased and some of it a bit damp, but I rescued what I could. My old cub cap from 1976 was there too, but had slowly rotted and fell apart a bit in my hands so that went in the bin liner, not without regret. There was another cap alongside it that had belonged to my grandad, which he had given to me to care for. Although I had been careless with it, it had thankfully survived, though I had forgotten what it was from or what significance it had had, so in a way my memory had done enough destruction.
There still seemed like an awful lot to do when I had to head off to Worcester. We are moving our stuff to our new flat tomorrow. It's going to be a tough day.
The Worcester gig was fine. In my teenage poem I asked, as usual about the fact that Tom's love making was over very fast and yet the poem also stated the girls he was with got damp. How did that happen? A woman in the audience suggested that the liquid was tears from the sad girls that Tom had slept with, which conjured up an amusing and unpleasant image of deflowered girls weeping over their own vaginas. It led to an odd, though funny excursion from the script.
A long drive home was made longer by the Motorway being shut, but my magic new sat nav (the old one was knackered) knew about this in advance and planned around it. It took me across country, through tiny towns, making the journey harder. But I stayed awake and got home to watch more of the blisteringly brilliant second season of Community. Loved the first series, but this one is in another league.
