12-16th Dec: Nap Attack!

This week was the start of me feeling Christmassy. Not because I sat on a sex offender’s lap, who uses the guise of Santa to get his creepy kicks in December, or that every shop I go into has a bellend behind a till wearing a 1.99 red hat but because I’d started eating way too much and sleeping in the afternoon. By the end of the previous week I’d had three Christmas meals over the space of four days but cannot tell you anything about them because they were not between nine and five. You can probably guess that they involved Turkey, someone getting too drunk, someone getting too emotional and bargain basement gubbins otherwise known as “Secret Santa”. It’s hilarious to see someone receive a £10 gift that has a had a bit of thought put into it juxtaposed with someone receiving one with no thought behind it. The recipient has to put on a brave face and pretend they really like it, but 3 hours later once they’re absolutely Prince Naseem Hammered they have to tell everyone near them how crap it is. Luckily between friends this is all harmless and amusing; I’m delighted I don’t work in an office where people who don’t really like each other buy each other useless crap. I saw a hilarious Ebay listing last week where some bloke hadn’t opened any of his presents and titles it “6 unopened & unwrapped Secret Santa presents given to me by female co-workers”. Ungrateful genius.

This excess of food combined with journeys to Edinburgh and back meant that I napped everyday of the week. The best example of me wasting a day was when I arrived in this lovely boutique hotel in Edinburgh at 1pm, where you get a 4 poster Tudor style bed and an x-box, I went to sleep, woke up, did my gig then went back to bed. The owners thought I was mental as it must have seemed like I’d travelled all the way to Scotland to have an expensive kip. When I arrived the woman at reception asked, “will your other half be joining you later?”. Being single at this time of year can be depressing in itself but when a stranger acts like you’d be mental to stay in a nice hotel alone, it rubs seriously coarse rock salt into your open puss-filled wounds. It made my already shameful hotel masturbation session even more pathetic and pretty much forced me into a mid December crank (crying & wanking). I don’t work in a hotel but if I did I would suggest that you never assume someone has another half otherwise you will cause them to desecrate your lovely 4 poster beds; I may or may not have done this.

Let’s hope next week involves less sleeping and more human company.

5-9th Dec: Hand me the Nurofen

I’ve been ill several times in my life but this is one of the most frustrating occasions because I’m pretty sure I know exactly how I contracted my illness. At the end of the previous week I left my flat at the same time as my neighbour, Roberto (not Alessandro as I thought for several months). He spent the 5 minute walk towards the station with me explaining that he’d been ill for days, then as we parted ways he shook my hand. Now, I’ve never been overly OCD but knowing someone’s flu covered hand has touched mine, made me extremely paranoid. So paranoid in fact, I diverted my route to the station to go via the pharmacy to purchase some of that hand sanitizer gel. I did so petrified of letting my hand touch any other part of my body, so was wafting it around like it was covered in dick sick. After this panic buy, I still contracted flu, which makes me think either that hand gel is a gimmick for idiots like myself or Roberto’s flu virus was quicker working than a 5 year old ADD sufferer on speed. I got ill in the least cool way ever; the cool ways being from snogging someone or playing paintball in the winter in old a t-shirt and shorts.

I was only a bit sick. The worst type of sick. If you’re fully ill, where you can’t eat or move then you can lie on a sofa watching action movies and masturbating without any sense of guilt. When you’re only under the weather you flit between wanting to be pro-active and wanting to do zero things. It’s the human equivalent of a semi-erect penis (if you catch my drift): if you had to get the job done you could, but you wouldn’t enjoy it or think you’ve done your best. Apologies for this slightly crass blog but I’ve been ill so leave me alone and bring me some soup.

I also made my first ever chicken soup that week. It tasted mainly of chicken stock.

Nov 28th- 2nd Dec. Bye, Bye, sex offender!

The moustache finally had to go. I was briefly tempted to keep it on my face but when whipped cream from a seriously tasty hot chocolate got stuck in it, I knew it was time to remove the top lip bush. I think it almost reached the level where people started to think I was wise. I nearly made the mo leap when people go from changing direction when they see you in the street to asking for directions from you. Now, I’m back to having just an all over crap beard which suits me fine. We managed to raise over 2k as comedians, which is pretty damn good: hopefully enough to contribute to preventing a few cases of dick and ball cancer.

Despite this good deed, it was generally a sad week for sport and comedy. The passing away of Gary Speed, Socrates and Patrice O’Neal (Youtube him now) all happened in the space of a few days. Although I didn’t know any of them personally, they were all exceptional in their fields and they should be remembered for bringing joy to the people that watched them. I find it intriguing how in this day and age all tributes are essentially done online. It’s rare now that people will write a card and leave flowers. Instead people will tweet “RIP”, followed by a tweet about what they ate for breakfast. This used to annoy me but I guess this is the way the world is changing. In 20 years when someone else famous dies I suspect no one will even bother writing “RIP” but instead just think it in their minds and then this gets scrawled on a robot re-incarnation of the body. Due to the inherently selfish nature of humans, when something like this happens to others you think about it happening to you. I’ve decided that if and when I play Connect 4 with Diana in the sky, whether you tweet or not about it please do not go on my Facebook and click “like” button under, “Chris Martin is dead”.

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