21-25th Trucking and Clucking

The worst thing about this job by an urban mile is having to do long car journeys on your own. Unlike the train, it’s generally frowned upon to watch an action movie whilst in transit. Therefore you have to spend most of your time listening to average radio, where you are guaranteed to hear one David Guetta or N-Dubz song every 15 minutes.

I had a drive to Leeds to do on a Friday. This meant I spent the whole week stressing about the prospect of sitting in my car in traffic trying to leave London. I was losing sleep over the whole debacle. Despite me panicking to the extent that I set off from London at 10:45am so I could not only dodge a jam and check into my hotel early, to get maximum value from my stay, I still got stuck in an hour’s worth of tossing traffic.

A couple of things I noticed from a long journey are: why do we ration out toilet stops? Why do people get shout outs on the radio? The former is utterly ridiculous. Despite needing to urinate when I’m 1 mile from a services I’ll try and last till the next service station 44 miles away in some sort of piss based endurance game where best case scenario my journey takes the just as long and worst case scenario I write off a perfectly good pair of pants. It literally makes no difference to your travel time, but for some reason once you get into a metal moving thing, you’re loath to stop and get out too soon. The latter also makes no sense. Radio 1 is just loads of shout-outs. Why are we fascinated with getting a person who has a little bit of notoriety reading out on the radio “shout out to Carey in Chigwell who’s stuck indoors revising today”? It’s not like that will make them work harder:
“why did you do so well on your GCSEs?”
“Fern Cotton said my name out loud at 11:30am”

It’s not like anyone else cares or will remember it 3 seconds later. I’ve never arrived at party and gone, “guys, have you heard the news? It’s Mark from Braintree’s birthday today!” For some reason we seem obsessed to the point where we will get terrible DJs in horrendous clubs to give shout-outs. Maybe, if those nutters in the streets shouting about God did shout outs they’d become more popular.

If you’re wondering why there is clucking in the title, it’s because I once again ate Nandos on my own. I’m living the Per-Peri dream.

Before I sign off just want to give a shout out to my friend Gary Smilehat, who became a dad today.
Toodles

Nov 14-18th: Watching War Crimes in Nandos

I really can’t remember much about the week, apart from trying to write amusing things and playing football. The only aspect that is engrained in my head is my end of the week travels. I travelled from Cheltenham to Nottingham after spending the night in a hotel, which had curtains made of bath mats. (photo attached).

The invention of the laptop really has made train journeys quite enjoyable. If it’s just over 2 hours then you can easily squeeze in 1 feature film or 2 and a half episodes of an American box set (if the episodes are 45 minutes long: yes you’re correct, I am amazing at maths). For some reason my timings were off and started watching the 2 hour movie “Rescue Dawn”, where Christian Bale is a prisoner of war in Laos., but only got half way through it. I worked out the reason for my delay was that the person sitting opposite me on a train subconsciously influences me. I was initially sitting opposite quite an attractive female, so tried to act important and cool by reading a book and writing in mine; as soon as she got off, I wacked on a film about war and started picking my nose. I’m now convinced if you ever want to get anything constructive done in your life you need to get a model to sit within a 3-metre radius of you. A cure for HIV would be found inside a month if the lab was in the centre of a Swedish nightclub dance floor.

This awful time management led to me heading for lunch in Nottingham with my head in a Laos but my body in a shopping centre in the Midlands. So rather than eating rice and worms, I headed for Nandos, a place where the service is not that dissimilar to a POW camp. Eating on your own in a restaurant is depressing enough but I decided to whip out the laptop and continue watching the movie. I’m pretty sure this is frowned upon, but when you’ve got earphones lodged in you head, the rest of the world seems arbitrary. I thoroughly recommend watching films in restaurants and trying to see how classy a joint you can get away with this. My new ambition in life is to try and watch the Lord of the Ring’s trilogy in The Ivy.

Right, now I need to pay my taxes. Rock n Roll!!!!

7-11th Nov: Perv Burgers

As part of Movember or Mexicanrapistlook-a-like-ember, one of the accidental perks I was unaware of is you get some treats for raising over a certain amount of cash. Me and Carl Donnelly became eligible for free burgers at the meat patty joint, Byron. For my money the best Burger chain in town (if you don’t live in a town then move to one as they’re way better than the countryside). The offer was available between the hours of 3-6pm, so basically meant only comedians and unemployed people would be able to take full advantage of it.

When we arrived, we saw a table of 4 tached up men and gave them a knowing nod. Rather than unemployed, they looked like businessmen who’d taken an exceptionally late lunch to save themselves a few quid. As well as raising money for charity, the other great thing about Movember is I feel part of a brotherhood. You give other men donning the bit tickler a knowing nod or a rye smile. I don’t think I’m in any way exaggerating when I say that if I saw another moustache wearer getting attacked, me and any other top lip townie would step in and help our hairy brother.

After taking down these complimentary tasty treats, we went to the cinema and due to the fact there was nothing on, saw Tintin. It has got a lot of good reviews, so I’ll give my no nonsense appraisal of it. Visually it’s excellent but after about 30 minutes, I realised I was watching a well spoken bellend with a crap quiff take his dog for a really long and tedious walk. I had absolutely no vested interested in any of the characters. So if you’re going to go to see it, bring an ipod.

Right, I’m off to scare some children.

Oct 31st- 4th Nov: Growing me a bit tickler

This is a week where traditionally most people dress up to look scary and watch over-rated explosions in the sky; it’s now become a period where womene dress like prosties and men grow silly facial hair for dick cancer. I’m doing the latter. As far as the former goes, I’m all for a seeing a good costume but when I went to gym on Monday, all the staff were in fancy dress. Getting told what to do by the gym staff is annoying enough as it, let alone when one of them is dressed as a wolf.

I managed to wrack up somewhere in the region of 300000 miles in 5 days for various gigs I was performing at, so spent almost all my daytime hours sitting on trains and desperately trying to find bread-free food due to my new “I’m a massive tosser” diet. Long story short, I ended up eating cooked chicken with my barehands whilst aimlessly walking through the streets of Ipswich. That sounds like a start to the world’s crappest poem.

So in reality, all I did was will my moustache to grow out to an acceptable length. By acceptable, I mean past the point of looking like a sex bandit. It has not grown past that point yet. Essentially I don’t think I can smile at kids for the rest of the month without getting vilifying stares from parents. I think they should rename Movember, “Sexbanitember”, however, I doubt it would be such a popular cause.

Please sponsor me and my bit tickler: http://mobro.co/chrismocomedy