Four years ago, on Christmas Eve I was surfing the net (as we used to say in the olden days) and clicked on a link on Chortle to discover that Dominic Cavendish of the Daily Telegraph had decided that Someone Likes Yoghurt was the worst comedy experience of the year. It had been a surprise to see myself on the page and more of a surprise to realise that someone thought I was the shittest thing in comedy in the whole year.
Today I clicked on a similar looking link to an article written by the same journalist to discover
a photo of myself and my name in a list of the best comedians of the year. In four short years I had gone from zero to hero in the opinion of the Daily Telegraph. Is it wrong to feel slightly disappointed? But mainly pleased.
I have been sleeping in late this week, which has been a joy and it's really lovely to not have anything much to do. Especially this morning because as I slept in my lovely live in lover went downstairs to make me lunch. She beavered away for an hour whilst I slept, making a quorn shepherd's pie. I was really looking forward to it. She finally called me down to the kitchen saying it was ready. I came down and offered to get her a drink from the fridge as my contribution to the meal. She wanted a lemonade and jokingly (and this is only a very light joke) I said, "We've only got cloudy lemonade, is that all right?" The joke here was that I knew she knew we only had one kind of lemonade, but I was trying to make out like there might have been a choice. Not really funny, I admit, but that's what I am like when I am not in the red hot glare of the spotlight. Slightly shit.
My girlfriend, who was in the process of getting the pie out of the oven, was confused by the question/weak joke and turned to me wondering what was going on. She took her eye off the ball (or more accurately the pie) and as I looked to her I saw the glass dish full of potato and quorn and carrots and peas and stuff slipping out of the over and on to the floor. Typically it all happened in slow motion, but typically there was nothing that could be done to stop the disaster. There was the crash of breaking glass and the slop of falling food and the whole lunch and casserole dish scattered over the floor. It was a disaster. It was at least partly my fault for asking a pointless and stupid question at the exact wrong moment. But mainly my girlfriend's fault for not holding on to something she was taking out of the oven.
There was no way of rescuing anything from this explosion of glass and potato. It was an awful moment.
My girlfriend was distraught over it all. It was a waste of food, a waste of her time and a waste of a casserole dish. All the effort she had expended in the last sixty minutes had been for naught. I could see why she was unhappy, but manfully took the blame and did my best to comfort her. Though I couldn't get across the new sea of smashed food and dish as I had no shoes on and there were shards of glass everywhere.
I was already finding the incident slightly amusing, but knew that she was not yet ready to laugh about it. And who could blame her? What a waste of time it had all been. But there was something lightly amusing (more amusing than pretending I might have a choice of lemonade) about a meal being ruined at this late stage, after all that effort.
It didn't matter about the food or the dish (even though I had had that dish for all my adult life), and whilst I was concerned that she might have cut or burned herself, it wasn't the end of the world. It didn't take anything away from the lovely gesture she had made of cooking my lunch. She had still done that. It was a pity we would never get to eat the feast, because it looked and smelled delicious. Maybe I should have risked death by eating a little bit. But instead I took charge and cleared up the mess - only cutting my foot a little bit in the process and cooking an alternative meal of fish fingers and baked beans, which is all we had in the house.
The disaster just brought us closer together.
And I was able to spend the rest of the day jokingly telling her to keep tight hold of anything she picked up. By the end of the day she was ready to laugh about this.
It was like being in a sit com.
