I woke up at 9 and had some more Cheerios and packed up the last of my stuff before running the couple of miles down the hill to my car, which thankfully was still there and still working fine. And I could still remember how to drive. I managed to park only about 30 yards away from my front door and then after a shower, packed up my car. I was keen to get going and looking forward to being home, even though it seemed like an alien and unfamiliar place that I had visited once in a dream many years ago.
I think this will be the last time I stay in this particular flat, even though it's been my Edinburgh home for the last 3 years. It is time to give a different Landlord enough money to buy a brand new car and hope that the next one feels guilty enough about how much he or she is charging to at least ensure that everything is in working order. Luckily cleaners will be coming in tomorrow to clear up the grime that a month of the lifestyle of 4 messy comedians has left behind. A pair of (I think) Justin's pants were hanging up beside the washing machine (though why? He had brought enough to get him through the whole month, vacuum packed) and I left them there as a tip for the cleaners. Or a strange warning of some kind.
I drove away at 10.30am with what I knew would be a long drive ahead of me. But after the relentlessness of driving myself around on tour, a single journey like this, in isolation, was actually quite enjoyable. It was sunny all the way and the traffic kept moving and I listened to the radio and felt a bit soppy at the new Take That song where Gary Barlow and Robbie Williams make up with each other. I had a couple of stops for food and petrol, but basically kept driving. At one point on the other carriageway I saw the aftermath of a recent shunt, where four cars had rear ended each other in the fast lane. Everyone seemed to be fine, if a little grumpy at their bad luck, but the cars were all fused together into one long car, arse to mouth, like a metal centipede. From the glum face of the man in third position I think he might actually have preferred to be in a human centipede. But it was a good lesson for keeping your distance on the motorway. And two of the people were feeling stupid for not keeping their distance and annoyed that the person behind was a big enough jerk to not keep his or her distance either.
No such bad luck on my side of the road and the 400+ miles slipped away easily. Usually this post Edinburgh drive is a living Hell of tiredness and annoyance, but I felt pretty fresh all the way, though a little zonked out by 7.30pm when I finally parked up outside my house. It was a delight to be back in Shepherd's Bush and now, as always, it was Edinburgh that felt like the dream. It had suddenly zipped by in seconds.
My girlfriend had lasagne in the oven for me and a warm embrace, though I think we both felt a little bit like a stranger had just wandered into the house. I was like the bloke in the Return of Martin Guerre or like Armin Tamzarian. I had stolen the life of Richard Herring. Girlfriend and lasagne aside I could have chosen better. But actually the girlfriend and lasagne are two of the things that make this one of the best lives to steal. Let's forget that I have a radio series to write and all the personality traits that make my life a living nightmare. As long as there is my girlfriend and lasagne.
I couldn't believe how brilliant TV looked (of course the TV in the Edinburgh flat was old and tiny and in the wrong ratio) or that I now had hundreds of channels. We watched
Bill Maher's Religulous which was a bit of a busman's holiday, given that for the last 26 nights I have been doing my own sermon about the stupidity of religion. But this was quite a different take and I like Maher, even if he was a little superior at times, though he made me fear for the world that I live in, which it seems is almost certain to be more deeply scarred or destroyed by the lunatics who have faith in the thing that their parents told them to believe and so hate the people who think different things, even though their parents told them to believe those things too and they are exactly equally deluded as the people they hate. There were a whole lot of nutcases in there, none of them able to even countenance that the thing they had been told to believe unquestioningly might be wrong.
We're fucked people. Let's take one day at a time.
