ii

Ever since he quit, comedians of his generation told him he had been getting somewhere and had made a mistake. They were off at festivals on the other side of the world, living their dream. It just wasn’t his. When he was a kid, he’d had a Mario game on his Gameboy. Every three levels, Mario would defeat a Boss, and find the Princess. The first three bosses all then turned into monsters, pranking Mario that he had made it to the end of the journey before revealing he had to keep fighting to rescue Princess Daisy. Comedy felt like an infinite series of monsters. He knew he was using it as a drug, enjoying the empty gigs, the failures more than successes, and when the end came he knew why.

Comedians saw themselves in a way he couldn’t relate to, once again knowing the world was right and he was wrong. Every comedian would talk about ‘doing things on their own terms’, ‘punching up’ and ‘speaking truth to power’ – but this was all a complete fabrication. No one does things less on their own terms than a comedian; they are in competition with other acts, not just to make the audience laugh the most but to convince the promoter that your laughter was of a higher commercial value than the laughter the other comedians generated. ‘Punching up’ consisted of finding a hate figure, generally a politician, and saying something smug. After the political ramifications of 2016, He was convinced that someone would go to Edinburgh and share his message, ‘you can’t call half the voters here or in America racist, when people are given two bad choices, it is the system’s fault.’ Instead, Stewart Lee, whom he had previously admired, had a line on his last show, ‘people who voted for Trump and Brexit, aren’t just racist. They’re cunts too.’ Stewart was now on an 18 month sold out tour at £25 a ticket on his working class values.

He was the rare figure in the arts who had studied Politics at school and university. He had been to grammar school, and Sheffield, which he was always quick to throw in the faces of the public school lot, as if to deny how comfortable his childhood had been. He knew that ‘speaking truth to power’ was a quote from Orientalism by Edward Said. Said explained that the Orient, which could mean anywhere between Istanbul and Tokyo, was important to the West as it could be defined as ‘exotic’, which made the West ‘rational’. The West had to define things in terms of self and other. So speaking truth to power doesn’t change the dynamic, it just tries to address it. Comedians didn’t realise they were just town criers, going across the country to repeat the same 20 minutes ad infinitum, or to Edinburgh to perform the same 50 minutes twenty five times. They were horses being broken in. By the time they made it, they had become so removed from everday life that they had no capacity to see themselves as a normal person.

It was hard to know what making it consisted of anymore. Since 2008, the Titanic had sunk. Panel shows, which had been designed for comedians to appear on to promote their sitcoms or acting work, had entirely taken over comedy. QI, Only Connect and Would I Lie To You were upper class parlour games. He knew he couldn’t keep thinking like this. Hating something he wanted no part of whilst bitter his chance hadn’t been taken. He’d wanted to do a show on mental health, which was all the rage now. But his mental health had gotten in the way. He thought comedy would make him an outsider, but it had turned attempts at art into a music magazine list – one bullet point of personal material after another. He could have either told all the one liners he had written for an hour, or gone on a Bill Hicks style rant and either way been the talk of the festival but had instead missed his moment. All aspects of pain had been removed one gig at a time, until it became generic, awkward, self aware. An unhappy compromise. Goodnight.

His material had consisted of the following setlist

Third

Oasis

Arsenal

Tinder

Crack

Paranoid

School – QE

Jewish

God

Ed M

Shy

Fart

Homeopathy

Freud

Cobain/Neil Young

Bipolar

Tapas

Microwave

Ideal comedy audience

This took about 7 minutes to say, so he had to slow it down or speed it up depending on whether the promoter was willing to give him five or ten minutes. He had written the setlist out before every gig, changing one or two words around. Each joke was deliberately written in one or two words so that he could work on the sentence structure to make it flow perfectly. The finished set ran as follows:

Good evening, I’m He. I was recently voted the third funniest person in my immediate family. My family has a long history of seeing me live, my first ever gig was singing Wonderwall around the dinner table at Christmas 1996 in a performance my Grandmother described as challenging. I’m an Arsenal fan, and much like the team I now spend my time underperforming with style in front of a largely silent crowd. I told that to my Dad and he said ‘yeah and you never score’. Which is why he was recently voted the funniest person in my immediate family. I am single, I keep being turned down by girls who say I’m a self pitying miserable mess, which is a relief as I thought I was ugly. I tried Tinder but it was too casual for me, my profile photo was of me in a wedding dress. Dating me is like taking crack, for most I’m easy to resist, for a select few I can ruin lives. I don’t take drugs, I’m too paranoid. I had friends at school who smoked weed and they’d get paranoid and I’d think they were impersonating me. I had another schoolfriend who was real. We were at parents evening when we were 15. What can I say, we had kids young, ha ha ha. And the teacher said to his parents “Mark’s been great, he’s done all his work and he’s not missed any school apart from the Jewish holidays.” Mark’s parents said ‘we’re not Jewish’. Mark was the first person to pretend to be Jewish to escape an authoritarian regime. I’m Jewish, I don’t believe in God, don’t care about Israel and eat a lot of bacon but I’ve got this face. This face is a promise land I can’t be bothered to visit. By a show of hands, does anyone here believe in God? If you believe in God and didn’t raise your hand that implies you’re more scared of me than you are of God. I see myself as the Ed Miliband of stand up comedy, but without the personality. I’m quite a shy person, if looks could kill I’d make more eye contact. I was walking down the street recently and I farted loudly by accident; well the fart was on purpose but the volume was way out of control. I panicked and started walking quicker then slowed down again immediately and thought ‘to anyone around me it looks like the force of the fart had propelled me forwards’. I was walking down the street and saw a poster which said ‘come to the Homeopathy Centre, what are you waiting for?’ and thought ‘peer reviewed scientific evidence’. Sigmund Freud was a peeping tom as a teenager, which they think was what gave him such insights into the sexual condition. I was a peeping tom as a teenager which is when I started making up facts about Sigmund Freud. Kurt Cobain wrote on his suicide note ‘it’s better to burn out than to fade away’, which is a Neil Young quote, but Neil Young’s in his sixties and doing better than ever. I was diagnosed as bipolar and I told that to a friend and he said ‘really, but I’ve never seen you with any energy or happy’. I’m alright guys, I’ve got mates. I’ve got enough mates to go to the pub, but I’ll never have enough for tapas. We’d only feel tense that we were paying full price for smaller dishes. On ready meals, there’s cooking instructions for 650W microwaves, but that’s an outdated model. I think they should remove the cooking instructions and replace them with a fun fact or joke like on a penguin bar. It’s important in life to have a passion, and that’s mine. I have a 1000W microwave, ladies. Well I say I have a thousand watt microwave, I’m living with my parents so it’s theirs, I’m heir to a thousand watt microwave, it’s part of my dowry. My ideal comedy audience wouldn’t have the energy or inclination to take the risk to leave the house, so thanks for coming but this has been an unhappy compromise. Goodnight.

“This book is a piece of one man fiction. It is an examination of the counterculture in an individualised society. Other characters besides the narrator are tertiary to the story. Partly, this is because I didn’t want to objectify people in my life in the pursuit of an arbitrary kind of success. The title is a mislead, implying some kind of hatchet job on an old partner – which isn’t the intention at all. I want friends, family and old partners to be able to read this, and see black humour at worst – rather than subjective retellings of old arguments. I’m bored of standups who think they’re funnier than anything and everything. I accept that art is always misinterpreted, and the wrong messages are taken out of it. As a pitch, this is Fight Club for people who hate Fight Club.”

“What’s the ugliest part of your body? I think it’s your mind” Frank Zappa

I never liked Zappa, finding him snide and cruel.

I believed Mojo features on his exploitation of the Beefheart Sound

O When Will I learn

He bailed the Magic Band out of jail

For Shoplifting Food

Locked In The Mojave Desert

Don Had Signed The Rights Away

Shouting at bandmates

PLAY IT MY WAY!

I bully too

Is it bullying without power?

Shouting at partner (or with?)

Shouting at kitchen withholding petty invoice through accountant

Shouting at family and friends

Shouting at Estate Agent Customer Service Representative

No one was listening before

They all say the same thing

Shouting makes me happy and them leave

Without Don Van Vliet threatening teenagers with brooms

They’d never have got anything done

And Frank was right

America had been sold off to the highest bidder

Or the lowest?

Deliveroo lost £128m last year!

Section 1

Inbetween Spells of Madness

i

He had a social condition. He could only see things in a positive manner, but once he expressed any point of view it became negative the moment the words hit the air. “It’s amazing nobody died”, he thought. For every comedian that had made it onto the telly, he knew five victims. Alcoholics, gambling addicts, female bar staff who had been plied with drinks and passed around as sex objects. His generation’s definition of success were a pyramid scheme, where the PR and Marketing teams lived like showbiz types and the comedians lived like industry types, scrambling round to manage their own diary bookings while their agent was off rinsing the free bar at cocktail night. The pyramid was:

Fame

Panel Shows

Broadsheet Supplement interview

Being paid in alcohol and spare change (years 2-4)

Performing to audiences of performers plus a smattering of 5-10 people

Somehow the club owners, agencies and executives had all bankrupted their businesses, far outstripping the personal debt levels of their acts. They had stuck to the old model, watching Friday nights in Soho perish slowly. The strong survived, and 30 clubs were now down to 5, and everyone was infinitely happier (he couldn’t go back to club gigs, but he was happy he didn’t have to serve as a subsidiary to the alcohol industry as the audience had too much fun to laugh in the right places).

The condition had been mislabelled by a psychiatrist in his last year of university, with the inevitable results (he kidded himself, knowing that he was still too in denial to admit he was like a prisoner who still claimed he’d been framed). Delayed graduation, short spells of employment and independent living followed by a return to the family home, where he could hear their pseudo psychiatric thoughts on his anxiety, his mood and how they all coincided with any negative views he had towards them. At the same time, if a stranger asked about his parents he would explain how they were the best parents in the world. That was the beauty of his condition, it only affected people that mattered. To the wider world he had developed the tools to reverse it. It wasn’t duplicitous or malicious, everyone agreed his parents were the best parents in the world. His siblings, cousins, and friends of the family were united. He had learnt to accept that if the world was right, he must be wrong. He kept talking to himself in his head, overanalysing everything as per usual.

“You know what it is, nobody had far to fall. The acts that made it were nice, easy to work with, and in it for themselves. The arts have learnt to reward the sane. That’s why so many comedians were in the Cambridge Footlights. They come up in sketch groups with one funny act; the likes of David Mitchell, Stephen Fry, Stewart Lee. That way anyone who was in a sketch group with them has every door open to them; the likes of Robert Webb, Hugh Laurie, Richard Herring. Cambridge University has worked out the best way through the arts is the buddy system. Find one person who is funny and overwrought and one who is charming and relaxed. Before you know it the first gets labelled as a tortured genius and the second as a brilliant, zany comedic mind.”

He was obsessed with American comedy, and had only ever really paid lip service to Alan Partridge or Peep Show or whatever else was the show of the day. He became a stand up comedian after consuming thousands of hours of American podcasts, featuring road warriors. Men in their fifties who’d scrambled out a career by going from town to town and gig to gig in the hope of fooling a casting agent into letting them be a sitcom extra in order to start putting money into the pension fund at 41. The problem was, he’d listened to so many podcasts that he’d decided to make his thirties as tortured as possible. He stopped gigging years ago in order to concentrate on being as miserable as possible, writing material (well thinking of it and saying it to friends and shop assistants) and wait for the world to catch up once he was middle aged.

I tried writing a novel and it’s like, there’s something in it but it needs a bit of editing and structure.

He met Her on Tinder, both of them complaining about how they hated Tinder. They compared worst date stories. She had been to a movie with a man who had sung the entire soundtrack of La La Land into her ear.

He was living in the middle of nowhere, the outskirts of Margate, He’d fallen out with another housemate, events culminated on his 31^st Birthday. He always hated big events, and the Happy Families act made it worse. He blamed them for everything. He saw them seeing him as a freeloader. He’d told them at the time, He’s not fit for work. He’d been having panic attacks everyday.

He hadn’t even moved to Margate, but a hamlet 2 miles up the seacoast. A village through road with a great Fish and Chip shop, an even better Indian Takeaway, an amazing vintage cinema with £1.50 ticket offerings and right on the seaside. He was enjoying hiding out from the real world. He was compulsively watching I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. He would tell her about Dec’s Dennis Wise joke. Dec would go to great lengths to explain how tiny Dennis Wise was, Ant would explain that Dec was short, and Dec would smugly ignore him. Dec would have had a Napoleon complex if Napoleon hadn’t been above average height for the time.

He immediately trusted her, as before they met she had already seen him at his worst. He had told her about the background in comedy, and said that if she wanted a joke he had recorded a couple of sets over the years and stuck them on YouTube. She had found the rant videos, the ones he’d forgotten to hide from the public. After that he told her everything, unspooled backwards until she knew it all. How he had attacked his peers on social media, how he had been at work in the call centre. How he looked at the Marketing team sending out the same tired tweets and decided to do three weeks of posts about being mentally ill. How the shrink had misdiagnosed him, how the flatmate had been passed around the middle aged comedians and plied with drink and drugs, how Stalin and her had never said a word to each other, how he didn’t know that Stalin pushing him to move in for free had such consequences.

He called his two previous girlfriends Hitler and Stalin, as one was an artist and one was Russian – and all three of them including himself were Jewish. He had developed a pattern since stopping comedy of falling into one relationship for 9 months, then out of the other. Same as the one from uni. A miscarriage of a partner, with a 5 year gap of loneliness and desperation inbetween that now felt peaceful compared to the toxicity of the line he kept finding between optimism and reality in others. He described Jewish girls as like lionesses, or women in checked shirt on World War 2 propaganda posters – high IQ and looked like they’d be good with a plough. He had said to Stalin ‘if it were the other way around and I was saying I paid your rent, you would call me a misogynist.’ She said ‘Yep! Too bad!’

While He had studied Politics, read a few weird novels over the years and had an unnerving capacity to remember swathes of factoids and song lyrics, She had actually worked. Three years his junior, she was a Deputy Head at the local secondary school. She had organised working class girls on trips to Hackney. She had taken them to visit the Bevis Marks synagogue, a CofE girl who didn’t realise that for his lots Synagogues were haunted with memories of being 12 and wishing you were anywhere else.

The same day she devised her own walking tour of Suffragette landmarks, trying her best to convince them along the way that they didn’t need to go to McDonalds for lunch. She had dropped out of the system taking a leave of absence from work to try to get her head together and fail disgracefully. She was sick of the bureaucracy and stresses of the school, midway through a reasonably amicable divorce, and was falling deeply into drink. Coming from the Kent netherlands, she wasn’t an alcoholic so much as too good at drinking. The seaside does that to people, littered with taverns for the lost from centuries back, corner bars of real ale and winter fireplaces. What was a girl to do?

They had arranged to meet for a coffee at two, with coffee meaning a pub that played metal music with a round she had bought in. A friend of her father’s popped in, speaking of a hiking trip to Snowden in a few weeks time, which she casually invited herself along to. It was the kind of ‘unrealistic but serious’ invitation. She wasn’t going to go hiking in Wales with men twice her age, but in her head she was there already with the gang.

He had the same curse of always making the wrong plan. Always jumping in and out of work inbetween protracted spells of unemployment. He’d had more jobs than the Village People put together. Supply teacher, theatre usher, Database Administrator at London Bridge Station, answering the phones for Jongleurs Comedy and later All Star Lanes. Each one more stressful and for less money than the one before. This curse had only broken in his last gig as a barman when they had raised the minimum wage. Ironically, his only full time career job had been as a Researcher for an employment charity. His least favourite comedian had told him that was a good one liner, and out of pride he could never say it onstage. His curse was that he didn’t know when to take good advice, just like every failing comedian taking an alternative route, offstage he was more narcissistic than anyone he would see as a sellout.

After University and before graduating, there had been two years he couldn’t talk about anymore, at the time he’d unpicked everything. Why he had done it, whether it was the condition or his own actions, ‘it’s always the quiet ones’ couldn’t have applied more.

He had said something vaguely to his parents about how he wanted to work in charity, primarily as a way to placate their barrage of questioning that interrupted his two year stint of sitting in his room cataloguing the cultural influences for his comedy career and would lead to a decade of shutting himself away and becoming all consumed with the latest obsession he had found on the corners of the internet to avoid watching a box set he found boring. A summary that skips over a lot from start to end runs as follows, but he could have filled the whole book. Everything on Stewart Lee’s website; the old Resonance FM shows, the shows with Richard Herring uploaded from old VHS copies (he felt prehistoric thinking back about how YouTube wasn’t really a thing then), every article he’d ever written. The 6 disc Fall boxset of 24 John Peel sessions. The download he found of every Half Man Half Biscuit Peel Session. The site that had a playlist of every track of every Festive Fifty track linked to a YouTube video (the process of complete cultural obsession took years, so YouTube was a thing by then), the first 300 or so episodes of WTF with Marc Maron (the podcast where comedians who had been going 30 years travelling from town to town in America shared the best and worst of stand up), 300 or so episodes of Comedy Bang Bang (a surrealist LA podcast), thousands of hours listening to The Best Show on WFMU (Tom Scharpling’s New Jersey based satirical podcast), an obsession with countercultures like Battle Rap (he spent a year watching every battle rap as the scene exploded, then died – these developed as a way of peaceful reconciliation in New York and Los Angeles following the Tupac and Biggie murders, as a way to use culture to stop gang violence and were now attended by P Diddy and Busta Rhymes in vast auditoriums – his favourite was Hitman Holla (‘pull while I blast one, let me hear that blast son, ‘holla let me get him’, ‘nah you fucked up my last one’, i’m thinking bout shooting a n***a get the screams out, the doctor pull his dreams out, ‘nah fuck that holla, imma knock him clean out’), a brief love of Robbie Williams’ songs about Manic Depression (Advertising Space and Come Undone made him very emotional) which took him to the present day where he fell to sleep listening to old Wrestling podcasts with stories of steroids, cocaine, booze and groupies in the 90s that were shocking and tragic and funny concurrently, played a free to use version of Risk online (Conquer Club). He was so consumed with things that didn’t make money because they were the best art, these battle rappers took to the stage and got millions of views in a week for being funnier than comedians are and with original material. His dream was to one day have a level of success where he could start his own podcast and pay all these figures to come on.

Back to 2010, his Mum found him a job with one of her friend’s charities, just at the time when he was finally graduating and working at an internship for a cool arts festival. It was during that last term of university, when he was at his worst, he became convinced he was a great comedian. So 5 years later he was in his worst dream and best nightmare, not great with a bipolar diagnosis really.

She had also had a breakdown at university, falling out with friends and out of love. She had been in journalism school, then retrained as a teacher – yet still had doubts that it was even for her. A chronic overachiever, she was diagnosed with Dyselxia as a teenager, before getting Straight As at school, a First at University, and delivering on the career ladder. She had seen every cool indie band, read every Julian Barnes novel and helped out at sewing clubs, start up breweries and was proactive in ways he wasn’t.

Where she saw people failing her, He saw himself failing people. He had dumped his university girlfriend, left his dissertation to the last week, messed around his social circle so that they still came to his gigs but could never look him in the eye. He had taken pride in getting by on an hour or two’s sleep a night til the shame all flooded in 3 months later.

Where He still lived like he was Peter Pan, She was Mary Poppins. She never shouted or told people what to do, yet had the maternal disciplinarian quality that enforced results.

Nine months later he was single again.

‘Hey Bobby Malone, It’s good to have you home, So you tried your own route and it didn’t work out, You’re not alone. A job that made you crazy, In a town you won’t miss, And the drunks you called friends, Were a means to the end, And this is the end. Hey Bobby Malone, how you have grown, A couple months on the couch, While you figure things out, Won’t do you wrong, Hey Bobby Malone. You couldn’t make rent again. Are you in trouble deep. You’re a strange dog with fleas, And your sister in peace (?), You’ve looked better son. Hey Bobby Malone, It’s good to have you home, A couple months on the couch, While you figure things out, Won’t do you wrong. Hey Bobby Malone! Hey Bobby Malone!’

Such a fucking beautiful album. Etiquette. Here’s what the song means to me

I had a few Oasis jokes in my stand up set that went as follows

“My first ever gig was singing Wonderwall around the dinner table at Christmas 96 in a performance my Grandmother described as ‘challenging’.

There’s a line in Wonderwall, ‘there are many things that I would like to say to you that I don’t know how’ which seemed deep when I was 9 but I now think it shows Noel Gallagher’s lazyness as a lyricist

There’s a Stanza in Do You Know What I Mean by Oasis that includes 2 Beatles references and 2 Bob Dylan references ‘Blood on the Tracks they must be mine, the Fool On The Hill and I Feel Fine, Don’t Look Back or you know what you might see’ and Noel no I don’t know what you mean but I know why you mean it, cocaine!

The thing is, in hindsight the stand up I wrote was deep down all wrong. Noel Gallagher is a genius writer if you look at him as the Bob Dylan of haikus. So Dylan and Cohen and Reed would like long, sarcastic poetry. Noel Gallagher writes short, emotional, poignant, positive poetry, best summarised in Live Forever, ‘Maybe, I don’t really wanna know, your garden grows, cos I just wanna fly, lately, did you ever feel the pain, of the morning rain, as it soaks you to the bone, maybe I just wanna fly, wanna live I don’t wanna die, maybe I just wanna breathe, maybe I just don’t believe, maybe you’re the same as me, we see things they’ll never see, you and I are gonna live forever’. Look at how much he says MAYBE then look that the album is called DEFINITELY MAYBE. Live Forever isn’t about the girl, it’s about LOVE. Love lives forever, the girl you break up with when you’re 17 is the girl you think about when you’re happily married at 41. Complaining about the weather, mowing the lawn, the dayjob is British but Noel WANTS TO FLY.

Now look at Casiotone’s lyrics Bobby Malone is home, Bobby Malone was drunk, Bobby Malone failed, but BOBBY MALONE IT’S GOOD TO HAVE YOU HOME, I’M CASIOTONE FOR THE PAINFULLY ALONE I LIVE IN THIS ONE HORSE TOWN AND NOW BIG CITY BOY BOBBY’S BACK WITH ALL THE STORIES, THE STORIES OF FAILURE ARE THE BEST, DO YOU KNOW HOW JEALOUS OF YOU I AM BOBBY YOU’VE HAD THE MISERY OF A BROKEN HEART WHILE I’VE BEEN PLAYING WITH MY KEYBOARD.

I’ve been Casiotone and I’ve been Bobby.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvO6TB5rmC8&spfreload=10

I had a great day yesterday. The employment agency I wanted to hear from invited me in on Tuesday, and sent me all these standard tests to complete. I found out I have a typing speed of 72wpm, and am pretty good on Excel, Office and ok on Powerpoint. They were these IBM designed tests, I don’t know if you’ve ever been on the quiz site www.sporcle.com but I’m addicted to it, random quizzes about old sport and pop culture facts – so this was like a mixture of that and a tricky GCSE anxiety flashback. It was important to me that I sat down and did it. I feel so much clearer about the kind of work I’m suited to, what my skills are and I’d like a career job I can throw myself into rather than the bar and kitchen work of the last couple of years I wasn’t really built for.

My Dad had a spare ticket to Arsenal vs Man United but I encouraged him to invite a friend from work. I love going to the football, but when I’m broke sitting on the halfway line at the Emirates for free feels undeserved. I think he’s sick of the site of me anyway. He shares a pair of season tickets with a friend who’s away, we used to go to Highbury 10 or 12 times a season and since then I’ve gone once or twice a year. We also have membership cards, which only cost £30 a year or so but mean that when I’m working I can book the cheap fun seats with the ‘real’ fans and take friends, I am quite looking forward to that. Just watching us destroy lower league teams a couple of times a season will be fun.

I wanted to give my Mum some space, so I looked on Facebook events and found there was a Late Night Tate Modern Uniqlo thing with a bunch of DJs I’d never heard of. I went down, from the distant Barnet suburbs to Tottenham Court Road, where I managed to try to walk from the Northern Line to the Central Line but actually managed to walk in a circle from the Northern Line to the Northern Line. I felt like an idiot because at King’s Cross I’m the KING of knowing which signs to follow to get through the tunnels quickly, but in my defence the signs were super counterintuitive. I made a decision to get off at Tottenham Court Road and walk to the Tate. It’s like Anthony Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential about how in debt restaurants shouldn’t throw good money after bad. Instead of stressing myself out doing the same walk to the Central line I’d just fucked up, I had been half thinking about walking from Tottenham Court Road anyway and went with that.

Outside the station there were three Americans lost looking at the map, who couldn’t work out which direction Soho was in so I stopped and pointed out the way they needed to go. I walked through the Holborn backstreets and went for a drink at one of those pubs near LSE, by Aldwych and The Strand. I only had a half, but I’ve gone from being a full time smoker to a weekend smoker. I stood outside, and there were 4 or 5 international students talking about Politics I ended up chatting with.

One of them was Catalan and his friend was asking about independence, and he said ‘he didn’t believe in the Nation State really’ but he said it in a way where I got what he meant. That ideally we should be formed inbetween a tribe and a country, and one government ruling a country of 50m doesn’t really make sense. I got to explaining to them how Scotland works, the history of it, how it comes from quite a conservative with a small c tradition, with Smith and Hume and all of that, how Thatcher fucked them over by stealing all their oil and not treating the drug, poverty and mental health issues they faced in the 80s, how the SNP was able to learn from that and protect them from the harshest realities of austerity this time, how they should have taken independence when they got the chance, how Salmond getting done for assault and harassment this week is damaging for them – even if he wasn’t leader – how they’re a party built on a single issue, how Corbyn is a great leader of the opposition even if he’s vague on policy.

This all sounds like a really boring lecture when I write it like that, but I’m actually surprisingly skilled at ‘middle talk’ with strangers. I think knowing when to let people talk, how to engage them and most importantly when to leave is the most important part. The reason I don’t explain what they said is because, firstly, I’m not good at writing dialogue, but also they had different views between them. One of them completely understood where I was coming from, another was very defensive of the political class without meaning to be and took himself very seriously, one of them was just a spectator enjoying the conversation more. The first one, who agreed with me more, asked ‘why don’t they have the yellow vests in London like they do in Paris? Why when all this terrible stuff is happening don’t the people march?’ I mean, London tried that with the riots and look what happened, and also Macron is very sub-Blair, and he’s wearing all these left wing robes and promising people everything, which does lead to a more direct conflict. In this country at the moment it’s hard to march because even the police hate the government now, Doctors hate Hunt’s NHS reforms, when the Conservatives have lost that sort of professional class, this period is going to do permanent damage to their party, similar to how Tony Benn trying to keep Britain out of the EEC (the EU’s name at the time) led to those 40 hour meetings in 1975 that split the Labour party, broke off the ‘gang of 4’ SDP that became the Lib Dems in time, led to Callaghan as an interim leader (he had Alzheimer’s and forgot to call an election in 1978 and actually sang a song at the party conference, it’s very cringey and written about here ). It’s amazing how much Mrs Miller taught us at A Level that still rings true today.

I went to the Tate Modern and it was on one level the worst hipsterfest in history. There was a meditation class in the Turbine Hall, awful drawing classes upstairs, massive queues for the small nightclub on the ground floor. On the other hand, young people today are so much better than the teenage Inbetweeners squad I grew up with. Duncan at school used to organise for us to go to the Tate Modern and that was great, he was good like that – he’d find £5 tickets to the first preview of the History Boys (which George explained to us was really shit) and also we’d go to Fabric or somewhere cool, he had a knack for finding good things to do. But my kid brother is 19, and when I say his generation is better I mean, like there are gay kids in his year that are just treated as completely the same. When I was at 6th form, there was one person who’d come out and was really popular, never bullied or anything, but calling people ‘gay’ was so common. These young art kids dress like they’re Andy Warhol and that is pretentious, but it’s way better than all the 16 year olds I grew up with who all wanted to look like Ross from Friends.

I made it up to the 10th floor viewing point of the new Tate building in the end. It took a lot of walking, getting lost in the first building, squeezing in cramped lifts. When I got there the cynic in me came out, and I asked some strangers if it was me or if London had been destroyed by all the skyscrapers, gutted out and turned into New York lite. They were already talking about how one of them works in a soulless tower block and how that Cheese Grater or Walkie Talkie or one of those buildings overheated once and they had to change the angles of the glass.

They actually agreed with me. We got to talking about how the City of London had more bad skyscrapers than good now, how like all the newbuild flats they felt very soulless, dominated the entire skyline. One of them told me about how she’d move the government to Birmingham, and we joked about how politicians think they should try and fit more into London when it’s always had way too many people compared to the rest of the country, and how they could have built these buildings somewhere where they could have been appreciated. One guy talked about the Green Belt, the area between London and the M25 that’s environmentally protected, and how he’s worried they’ve eaten into it bit by bit.

This girl who worked as a designer for a dress company got very flirty with me (writing that sentence makes me feel about 97). She told me I was funny, knicked a cigarette, stuff like that. I didn’t pursue it, just because well – in 2016 and 2017 I pursued a lot of things like that, and everything I thought would make me happy about it didn’t. It was when she joked about hating her job that I realised – the thing is I try and fix people, I get too emotionally involved, and I’m just not good at the whole casual thing. I’m still talking to a girl I used to see a lot and we live on different sides of London but meet up sometimes, and really with her I’ve learnt it’s the friendship side of companionship we value more than sex or whatever. I think a lot of the time people are too hungry to eat. They pursue dating and sex and relationships through a neediness, like a very basic equation, they’re alone and unhappy so if they were less alone they’d be more happy, but I think it’s worth saying no sometimes, or not saying yes, just so I can go home and regret what could have been, I think I enjoy that more than an actual relationship.

I found that german bar in London Bridge and watched Arsenal get destroyed in the Second Half. I dodged a bullet not getting that ticket.

QUICK BORING LIFE UPDATE: Job stuff finally going well – post chef burnout, moving in with girlfriend, breaking up with girlfriend all between June-October last year, and ending up back at my parents last year things are finally coming round. Found the right Bipolar support group, feel steady off meds but also have researched the meds with far less severe side effects if I need them, got my CV to a point where the right recruiters are responding to my emails, ready to throw myself into a dayjob, loads of admin based things in arts, tech, gaming that won’t lead me to be a hollow marketing don draper wannabe but where the work ethic I’ve built up will be rewarded.

OK, tribute to Mark E Smith. I wrote this letter to Lauren Laverne’s show the day after he died, which summarises my feelings at the time.

Hi Lauren and the team,

I have a peculiar world record, having seen The Fall 14 times live, all with the same lineup. I’d like to thank Pete Greenway, Kieran Melling, Elena Polou and Dave ‘The Eagle’ for how much stability and sanity they brought to the last decade of The Group. I loved seeing a younger crowd turn up to each show, then waiting for a tube home there’d always be a bunch of middle aged men moaning they hadn’t listened to The Fall since 1982 and didn’t recognise any of the songs.

I started becoming obsessed with The Fall after recovering from some mental health problems at uni. They had so many references to authors or cool old bands in their music, it was really inspirational. A gateway into a world of good taste. So many of the bands who John Peel played disappeared after he died, but The Fall played larger and larger venues. It is tragically inevitable that MES died before a sold out Brooklyn residency, having had two lineups implode in the States.

I’ll stop rambling.

Music choice would be ‘Two Librans’ from The Unutterable. The Unutterable, Are You Are Missing Winner and The Real New Fall LP are a remarkable sequence of records from 2000-2003. The two albums that completely reinvigorated them with the worst thing they ever did in the middle. Which must be some kind of lesson about bravery to artists everywhere.

In hindsight, the things I respect MES for aren’t the cliches of changing the lineup or releasing an album every year. In the 80s that was far more commonplace, and artists like Billy Childish or Julian Cope have done the same thing with bands in their own way. The things I respect MES for most are:

• Turning down Virgin Records in 1977 because he didn’t trust Branson and postponing Live At The Witch Trials for 2 years (that’s why they had 2 albums come out in 1979, MES writes about it in Renegade)
• Changing with the times, Mark put so much thought into his favourite London venues – that’s why I saw them so much – my least favourite Fall gig was at Shepherd’s Bush Empire as the sound sort of cascades up but gigs at Indigo2, Islington Assembly Hall, Koko, Coronet – he’d either play interesting venues or ones where he clearly felt comfortable – that’s why seeing The Fall was like seeing a Football Team, that sense of fans in replica shirts in the pub beforehand. The support bands of unknown and the trolling of Safi Sniper (playing Suspicious Minds on a stutter for 25 minutes on a videoscreen) meaning that when The Fall came on at 10pm the crowd were agitated in a way that soon became very spontaneous joy. Mark also understood that in the 80s there was a living in putting out records and then when the Record Industry committed suicide there was a living in playing live.
• The Fall were the only ‘Peel band’ that became more successful after John Peel died. So many mainstays of the show (Delgados, Ballboy, Mclusky, even bands like White Stripes or Super Furry Animals) – dwindled afterwards creatively, Peel was a curator who would highlight their best album tracks and Mark was the only person who really understood how to curate himself and know good from bad
• Also, Mark’s attitude of ‘don’t be a scruff, it’s only the squares that dress to look interesting’ – there’s something as a babyface sarcastic person in the arts to some extent, I really relate to that Manchester-Irish sense of pride. He was very family oriented, very personable, go to The Fall Online and there’s an archive of all the Christmas Letters he wrote to the fans every year that really give an insight into his character – he sought a real connection with people.
• Also, most Fall Fans are geeks who like the early stuff cos they were sci fi nerds reading Asimov at 14 and like when MES did that in music, but I think The Frenz Experiment onwards, the sloganeering of that second half of The Fall, Mark really understood something deep about the world. That’s why a song like Free Range relates so strongly to Brexit, because he understood that once Europe becomes a slogan, that’s a very dangerous precedent. Free Range talks about rising violence in the Balkans before Blair went after Milosevic even. I can’t be arsed to start comparing MES to the International Relations lecturers I had, but he sort of had an intuitive understanding of politics and the media, something like Gut Of The Quantifier and him making fun of politics just becoming statistics, and the focus group obsessions of Kinnock’s Labour, he was a sort of one man alt right of 1985, the middle ground between Bernard Manning and Liam Gallagher. Like ‘if I was a communist, a rich man would hail me, the opposite applies’, writing that when he was 22, I don’t literally mean he was right wing so much as he was clearly influenced by Frank Zappa (he talked about Zappa a lot in later interviews) and took a ‘We’re Only In It For The Money’ approach where he hated Bob Geldof types who would become rich off of a sort of contrived empathy for the poor. I myself am a communist, which is why rich men hail me.

OK TOP 20 FALL MEMBERS LET’S GIVE IT A GO:

1. (CONTROVERSIAL) – CRAIG SCANLON – Years back I heard Mike Joyce play 2 Scanlon solo songs that were amazing. I LOVE that he was in The Fall for 15 years, kept his mouth shut, made amazing guitar punk rock afterwards that I don’t think he’s ever been arsed to release. What a guy
2. MARK E SMITH – Loses 1 point for being emotionally abusive, but that is relatively the least harmful kind of abuse, yknow?
3. TIM PRESLEY – The only break from my world record run mentioned above was when he was on paternity cover for Greenway. Without him The Fall would have been FUCKED following the US Tour meltdown of 06ish.
4. MARCIA SCHOFIELD – ahead of 5 and 6 and 7 for avoiding the lothario charms of the MES wonder
5. BRIX SMITH – Saw the Extricated at Dingwalls, was very good, I frequently go to Mr Start and ask her husband geeky music questions then buy a posh shirt in the sale. He’s very nice but a little wary of me these days.
6. JULIA NAGLE – Along with 8, created the Keyboard based 1994-2018 FALL SOUND. Without her, no Unutterable.
7. ELENI POLOU – Made Taurig without Mark, and it’s pretty great. Loses a point for getting bored of backing vocals post-2010 and forgetting to make another Taurig.
8. DAVE BUSH – Similar to 9, kept his mouth shut and moved on to better things with richer bands
9. Simon Wolstencroft – this all bold all caps thing is a nightmare so done with that now.
10. Paul ‘craig’ Hanley – told me a good story about meeting Damo Suzuki once.
11. Steve Hanley – I don’t like that he was always quiet then wrote a book being all snide (I dunno I haven’t read it I’m probably being mean)
12. Karl Burns – 10/10 musically 1/10 hygiene
13. Michael Clapham – he used to book me for paid work in comedy when no one else would
14. GREENWAY – very loveable and lost his hair gracefully
15. THE EAGLE SPURR – Seems like I’ve gone back to all caps again
16. Kieron Melling – Back to lowercase
17. Marc Riley – when two men fall out as friends it can be more painful and long lasting than any divorce. Riley’s everyman nature brought out the best in MES
18. Spencer Birtwistle – the only one of the mid 2000s lineup who left with any dignity
19. Steve Evets – did 3 gigs then made Looking For Eric, perfect bassist.
20. Ding – loses 5 points for joining Pixies afterwards.

I stopped smoking again this week after the relapse and went back to sleeping 12 hours plus a day.

I couldn’t take all the rejection from more job agency and flat viewing failures.

Last night I dreamt I’d uploaded a track to soundcloud and it had a million listeners but I was accidentally logged in to someone else’s account and he got all the royalties but I got booked for some headlining tour.

I hate myself, my anger, my narcissism, my selfishness, my constant underachievement.

I often think of garbage island. How there’s a continent of rubbish in the Pacific, the size of North America. How all humans do is kid themselves about recycling, and just move all our refuse to be dumped by boats that then goes into a whirlpool and makes a giant rubbish block.

I woke up at 7am this morning, ready for the working week. I’d seen a job agency on Friday and found two more to contact today. I had some admin to do that’d help me register for Universal Credit that I’d been postponing for ages. I’d been to two flat viewings last week that were still open ended.

It’s now 6:32pm and I’m still in bed. I cooked some pasta and tomato sauce, some eggs (badly) and ate some bread and peanut butter and salad while it was cooking at around 2pm. Apart from that I’ve not left my room. I put on a podcast, lie down, drift asleep and awake and that’s repeated all day. I am not really depressed today, I think the relevant factors are as follows:

• I stopped smoking for the last 6 weeks of 2018, then took it up again on New Year’s Eve, I decided this morning to stop smoking and my logic works where I think if I don’t leave my room I won’t smoke today
• I can’t take rejection very well. Something like visiting an agency or a flat and not hearing back gets doubts in my head going. A lot of the time these doubts aren’t the cliched ‘I’d never be good enough’, but they are weirdly abstract. ‘What’s the point of working anyway? What if no one had a job?’ I’ve emailed my CV round hundreds of agencies and literally heard back from 1 or 2, which tend to be the ones I call and beg a bit.
• I can talk myself in and out of things at will. I’ve got a sense of what I’m good at and what I’m not, but every day I decide I’m going to work in HR or be a Copywriter or work in Sales or do This or do That or live in West London or East London or South London or North London.

I don’t know, I don’t really wanna talk about this anymore. I know sometimes if I write about something it makes it less likely to happen in the future. At the start of the year I spent 3 days without leaving my room. I never really know if I’m feeling better or getting better or what the end goal of all of this is.

The blog I wrote earlier this week, ‘Using Bipolar For Good’ – about how a mental health charity took my feedback on board – the person I spoke to never got back to me for my written feedback like they promised to.

Today I kicked off at someone on Facebook again, it used to be a daily occurrence. I thought a few years ago I could use social media to deliver a more serious message. That beyond gossiping or self-promoting, it could be a tool to address some more serious problems that were going on in the comedy world.

This was crazy of me. I legitimised my anger online by knowing that I would rather put it on the internet than have it directed at my partner at the time or my family. Obviously, it blew up in my face. Probably deservedly so. I isolated myself from a lot of old friends, similarly to what I had done at Uni the first time around. The worst part if and when I bump into those friends is that I can see that they wanted to help, they tried their best. It’s a chasm that’s self imposed. I wasted so much time after uni thinking of how I could get those friendships back to how they were, but it can’t be done. They’d all seen me be too much of myself. It’s all very Jekyll and Hyde with me.

I feel that there’s so much to say politically about the world today that isn’t just to rile up an audience, to call people snowflakes or racists for voting Brexit. Doing it in 50 minutes in Edinburgh, I don’t have it in me. I had written an application for the Edinburgh Fringe and just deleted it. I know that, whether or not I have the capacity to do a show, it’d drive me crazy. I couldn’t handle success and I couldn’t handle failure. Success would just be a year of interviews and hotels, which would be awful for the grandiosity and insomnia that colour my mental health. Failure would be being ignored for not being smart enough, funny enough – I know my real failure is I’m too sensitive to put myself out there and that’s endless torture. You can’t really be a self-critical stand up comedian to my extent and make it work.

I think a lot about The Devil and Daniel Johnston, the documentary about the bipolar outsider Texas musician, recording albums in his basement that drove his family crazy and created the hipster movement in the Austin music scene that contributed to SXSW and that cool part of Texas. I’m sure a lot of Johnston fans see his family as being against his art and his genius, but I’ve seen first hand how hard I am for friends and family to be around. I’m not calling myself a genius artist, I’m saying in my head I am and it leads me to get stuck in my own thoughts, malaise, frustration, it’s very hard for people to be around.

Generally I’m quite optimistic that life is going to work out my way, but it’s before I go to bed the doubt hits me. It’s then that I can often see the pointlessness and hopelessness of it all. The nights I see it most darkly, I often wake up positive, drained of that negativity. I have worked a lot so that now I sleep every night, after a decade of every couple of weeks keeping myself up with worry. I hope I can be one of the minority of people who has my condition who turns things around and overachieves. I’m 32 and terrified.