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Added one more plant to the weekly tally to make 65. The humble pea. You assumed I'd had peas already, but I waited right to the end. Fresh ones too, none of your frozen muck. Right 90 plants next week then! How many edible plants are there? I'm going to prove my dominance over them all.
I went to a house party last night. Because I am the kind of cool person who is invited to house parties, about once every 15 years. Unsurprisingly it was Catie who had managed to do the social networking necessary for us to secure a party invite in Hitchin in just three short months. I am shy and socially awkward and left to my own devices I'd happily stay in the house forever playing Civilisation II and never speaking to anyone.
And when I say happily I do of course mean deeply unhappily and lonelyly and wondering how to ever make friends.
Anyway I am usually OK when I get to these things and have a few drinks and relax and get drunk and embarrass myself and have to go home and never get invited again. Except it's now almost four years since my last alcoholic drink, so I had to do all this sober.
I really enjoyed myself though - we only had a small window of party time as our baby sitter was booked til 10pm, but that suited me. It's around about that time that everyone gets boringly drunk and I get boringly ready for bed. It was enough time to meet some of the cool people of Hitchin and there does seem to be a thriving artistic community here, including artists, a very cool DJing hairdresser and comedy people too. At one point I found myself talking to three other men who, like me, had received the
Radio 4 Comedy Bursary, a scheme at the channel where promising new writers get a contract worth a few thousand pounds (I think it was £6000 they year I did it) to get them on their feet. There's some pretty impressive names on that list.
The other three have been recipients in the last 10 to 15 years, whilst we have to go back 33 years to the time I was in the chair (there wasn't a chair). They all seemed to have to work quite hard for it, working as script editors on the weekly topical show as part of the deal, whereas I think we just got on with the work we were doing On The Hour, End of the Roadshow, Lionel Nimrod's Inexplicable World - maybe we were still writing for Weekending at the point too. But there were no script editing or production duties for us. That six grand life-line made all the difference for me though. Stew was doing much better with stand up gigs (I think I gave up in 91). I was in that Light Entertainment Corridor at Langham Street (since demolished, hopefully not due to the contamination from the farts of me and the other stinking writers) most of the time or in the Yorkshire Grey nearby where I was usually drunk and once got kicked in the head by a man who thought I was laughing at his friend who was sliding down a wall cos he's just punched him (I wasn't laughing at him, I was pretending to laugh at a joke about Nietzsche to impress a woman I fancied). Maybe the kick in the head is why I don't remember anything more. And maybe I died that night and everything that has happened since is just the result of my mind creating a future as my life ebbs away. All I can say to my dying mind is, have a bit more ambition you prick. Why didn't you imagine yourself being successful.
Maybe Radio 4 should have a party for all the bursary winners - the 50th anniversary isn't far away - though imagine the social awkwardness and stench of such a gathering. And that's the successful writers.
