“Where the fucking hell is Chelford?”

In retrospect, you should never do two things as a comedian.  One, take a gig in a place you’ve never heard of (see also, Fence, Slawit, among others – although I’d heard of Blackpool and that turned out to be a nightmare anyway), and two, trust another comedian to get you there.  Unfortunately, on Saturday 7^th May 2016, otherwise known as You’ve Been Nabbed 25, I had no option but to do both.

Let’s talk a bit about how I ended up in this situation.  Well, first of all, when Rick Hulse tells you to be somewhere, you’re there, on pain of death, lest you be found bleeding with walking stick marks emanating from your face.  Not only that, but I felt a sense of loyalty – even now, Rick’s unique in being one of the few comedy promoters who’s somehow never managed to bullshit me once, even from the first night I met him.  Yes, as my cerebral palsy-ravaged body wobbled off back to my mate’s car after a moderately successful middle spot at Gatley Golf Club (a place far too Tory for me or Rick in hindsight), his words rang in my ears – ‘giz an email, fella – you were fucking hilarious’. 

It would be egotistical of me to say this wasn’t the first time I’d had good feedback and then mysteriously never heard from the person again, but my hopes weren’t exactly high as I dashed off a quick email to the proprietor of Smacked Arse Comedy.   To his credit, he had me booked in by the end of the summer, playing a fun rally localish to me in St Michaels.  Not 5 seconds after coming off stage, Rick boldly promised me what, to a early 20s aspiring comedian, sounded like the world – the opportunity to play for 2000 people on a May bank holiday, at the biggest biker festival of them all – to NABD at least.   Still sceptical, I shook hands with him, drank a quick cider with the other comics, and rode off into the sunset, privately thinking I would probably never hear from anyone involved again.

Well, stone me, he only went and offered it me, didn’t he?  YBN 25.  7^th May 2016.  2000 people.  A middle spot on a lineup full of contempories.  Who could say no?  Certainly not me, and in my youthful impetuousness, I actually agreed to the spot before I even looked at a map.  Ah.  One problem.  See, cerebral palsy can give you a number of things  – better places to park being one of them – but it doesn’t exactly assist you in getting from A to B.  Particularly when you don’t know where B even is to start off with.  No matter, said the big cheese himself – I’ll get one of the other lads on the bill to bring you.  Well, thank the lord for Tom Little, he was to be my chauffeur for the day, and an incredibly talented middle spot in his own right.   So that’s where you join me – Salford Central train station, about 10:30am, on Saturday May 7^th.  Knowing the area intimately as I do, I wasn’t exactly surprised to see a battered car heading towards me shortly thereafter – if anything, it not being on bricks was a bonus.  I was slightly shocked to see, however, that it’s windscreen was in rough shape – suffice it to say, if the car was a horse, they would’ve shot it.   Imagine my consternation when this battered old heap, that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Scrapheap Challenge, pulled up next to me, to find that it contained Mr Little, and was my only method of transport to the mythical biker’s field.  Christ.

Fortunately, unlike most comedians, I like being on time, so we had a couple of hours to spare – probably for the best, given we were travelling at an average speed a horse and cart would get irritated by.  Anyway, after more pointing and gawking than the residents of certain rival Northern towns do at planes, we careered onto site about 12pm, looking for all the world like we’d just won the Wacky Races.  After explaining our woes, getting wristbands, and getting parked, we headed into the marquee, our home for the day.

Tom and I stopped for a while to survey the scene; a tent holding maybe, at that point in the day, about 300 people, seemingly half full and with a nice atmosphere building.  Okay, maybe not quite the Albert Hall, but certainly better than playing the Rat and Parrot in the middle of who-the-fuck-knows-where.   After a brief pause for a drink (both of us sticking to water, marking us out as outsiders, Deliverance style). we swerved the pleasing sounds of a somewhat-mellow country rock band to hide backstage.  Fortunately, Rick and his posse were already waiting for us.

The camaraderie of a backstage or green room for comics cannot be easily explained to someone who doesn’t know it; all of us are slaves to our nerves, neuroses and bravado, and nothing brings it out more than being around other comedians. I suppose in caveman times, we’d have been measuring our appendages or something.  Anyway, it’s never been the most comfortable of places for me – gobshite though I am, I’m not an easy self-promoter, and I took the opportunity to have a bit of quiet reflection and mentally going over my set.  That’s not the easiest of tasks in a Smacked Arse Comedy green room however, and I turned down a smorgasbord of substances from the controlled to the outright mental – no one can ever say that bikers aren’t hospitable.  Jokes aside, it’s a lovely space to be around, very friendly, no bullshit, and I soon settled down into pre-gig mode.  I noticed quite a bit of nerves from the other comics, even seasoned ones like Silky, and I wondered what was wrong with me. Should I have been more nervous?  At this point, I was preparing for a crowd of a few hundred, and having sat myself down, had no interest in going back out to check if it had increased since then.

In any case, I got my answer pretty quickly, as Rick went out to open the show.  By now I’m pretty familiar with Rick’s….unconstrained style of MCing, so I listen out for the bits I know, and I laugh at the ad-libbed bits I don’t.   What does shock me is the wall of sound of laughter that comes back with each joke.  Fuck.  Have I misjudged this?  I start to turn so white that for the first time in recorded history I actually cave to the repeated offers of a pre-stage drink.  It barely touches the sides, and by the time the two openers have been on, my heart rate has probably tripled.

Still, it’s my time – Rick cheerily informs me during the break that it’s me up next, and I should probably get ready now, as he’s not going to do very long, and er…’the stage might take you a while’.  Eager to please, I’m there, still not looking out, instead looking at Rick from the side of the stage.  After what seemed like an eternity, he calls my name, the applause starts, and for the first time since I was Captain Hook in Peter Pan at school, I start to walk the plank.  Almost literally, as my legs, a curiosity at the best of times, have now turned to jelly, I’m navigating something that could be charitably described as an orienteering course, and Rick, my only help in the world, is probably the only person within 10 feet of the stage wobblier than me. 

Still, we eventually get it right, and I’m sat in my chair, looking out.  That’s when I become aware that, unless the alcohol has really kicked in, or I actually did take one of those pills backstage, that quaint 300-400 crowd I previously imagined has now quintupled.  I’m looking out at 2000 people – and they’re all ready for me to make them laugh.  The last thing I remember for the next 10-15 minutes is Rick, my life raft in this sea of sudden anxiety, passing me the microphone, and fucking off.  I take the microphone, I talk for 15 minutes….I couldn’t tell you what I said, but it seemed to be working.  I even managed to cover up an alcohol induced blank in the middle by adlibbing a new joke.  All in all, I was satisfied with my work, even if it wasn’t exactly a performance that would have agents knocking down my door.  Smiling cheerily, I say my name one last time, plug my socials one last time, and proceed to put the mike in the stand.  If that was all that happened that day, I’d still have overcome a lot.  Of course, it didn’t.

I honestly can’t recall what happened in the next 30 seconds, other than it seemed to start as a rumble, and then quickly became an avalanche.  Oh my god, they’re standing!  And it’s for me!  My body was not ready for that, not that day, not any day – as if evidenced by the fact that I couldn’t even walk off stage, long after Rick made me stay and take in the moment.  He would later tell me it was better than sex.  I’ve still no idea if he’s right or not.  All I know is the tremendous emotion that washed over me.  In life, you don’t get many opportunities to feel like you’ve done something special, and you get very few moments where people show you you have.  This rapidly became both.  My eyes water now writing about it – that moment, that outpouring of love, that feeling of achievement…

I remember so little else of that time period of my life – that was now 7 years ago at the time of writing – but I remember that day.  I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as fulfilled, accepted, happy, and sure of myself as I did that day.   Sometimes I wonder if I ever will again.  There are so many dark moments in my life – I suppose most of it stems from the disability, as I go through both mental and physical turmoil and pain on a regular basis. I accepted that as a fact of life long ago.   That said, I’ll always remember NABD, I’ll always remember this moment, and no matter how I’m feeling, I feel like I can always come here and see a moment in time when I felt invincible. A moment where I looked out and thought ‘christ, I’m not a waste of space after all’.  That was NABD’s power, and that was your power as an audience.

The thing is, it wasn’t just a moment for me, but for everyone in the tent. We stood (me barely) together, you beautiful people and me, just for a moment, and I fucking loved it.  From what could’ve been a disaster, my life changed forever, and not only that, it reminded me who I was, who I could be, and opened the door to what I’d become later.  It seemed to set off an incredible rolling momentum that seemed to spike my life into life itself, I rolled into a job into Manchester, I now live there, I got to do more comedy in more places than I ever imagined, I got to live out dreams, I got to fall in love, I got to do things I never thought I could.

Not to end on a downer, I’ll give myself the last words from that fateful day.  After a suitable amount of crying in a portaloo, a substantial amount of backslapping, an equally emotional moment watching a Spitfire fly over, and wondering if I was in some sort of fairytale of a day, I called home to share the news.  After playing it down as has been my wont for my entire existence, I closed with a line that I think aptly sums up a comedian’s life.

“What do you think about KFC for tea tonight?”

For you can be fantastic or terrible, they can love you, or they can hate you, but ultimately, once the light goes off, it’s time to get off the stage.  All you can do is hope for a moment that you remember.   NABD gave me that.  And it meant everything.

It probably won’t surprise you to know that one of the biggest questions I get is ‘do you wish you were normal?’  Like most things, the answer isn’t that simple.

One thing I wish people knew about disability is how easy it would be and sometimes is to get downhearted about the things you don’t have, because when I think about it, there are a million things I wish I could do.  For example, I wish I could play a game of football, just once, and throw myself into tackles safe in the knowledge that I’d be able to get up unaided afterwards.  Maybe I’d even try donning the pads and helmet and hitting some people for the Manchester Titans.  Hell, sometimes I wish I could’ve driven a rally car or something like my dad.   I think if I’d had the chance, I’d have tried any sport that would’ve taken me.  I know wheelchair sports exist, I know disabled sports exist; but just once, it would’ve been nice to play in the same team as my peers, alongside them, in the trenches, going to war.  I didn’t ever feel I wasn’t a part of what they did, but nonetheless, they all experienced feelings I never could, and I wished I had. 

It’s not all about sports or athletic things – even the mundane always felt like it eluded me.  I spent 15 months locked down during Coronavirus, and it suddenly dawned on me on those nice, never ending evenings in the summer, how much I’d like to just walk, without thinking about time, distance and destination.  In fact, thinking about it, I’d like to do anything without planning for eventualities where I might struggle or hurt.  I’d like not to constantly be thinking three steps ahead when I walk. It’d certainly have helped my anxiety.  Shit, sometimes I see an advert on the TV, or a music video, and I see people skateboarding or rollerblading down sun-kissed streets in California, and I find myself wishing I could do the same thing.  That walk down the Embarcadero in the middle of a heatwave in San Francisco? Rollerblade that shit. I wish I could’ve.

It’s stupid, dumb, romantic stuff too.  If you’ve read this far, that’s probably not a surprise.  But maybe I did all those things and said all those things because the one thing I yearned for was to feel remotely confident around women, or to not have to worry about certain ‘physical’ things I’d quite like to do without having to explain first.  Or things like being able to go on a dating site without having to feel like you have to explain that you’re disabled, just in case she meets you and decides immediately you’re not the one.  Most of all in this sector of wishes, I’d like to feel confident that if I ever do get married, my first dance won’t look like someone shifting a very uncooperative and bulky fridge.

It’s no one’s fault that these things are an issue for me, or that my disability might be an issue for them – in a romantic sense, it’s a human response to feel a little bit put off by something different from the norm.  It’s an impulse to worry about a relationship with someone who’s not as able-bodied as you.  Athletically, it’s arguably a doctor’s career on the line as to whether they would ever clear you to play sports, in the knowledge you could get badly hurt.   Sometimes you start seeing it everywhere –  I can’t tell you how many job interviews I went to and loved, but then didn’t get the job, despite seeming qualified. I’m sure it happens to everyone in some form or fashion a number of times, but with me it always felt…different.  Maybe that speaks to my own insecurity, maybe I have to be big enough to admit that.  After all, an employer might know he needs physical work and think you can’t do it, and that’s perfectly reasonable.  You might just not be ‘the right fit’ for the job.  But the thing I always took away was that I found my disability a barrier to some.  Maybe it was neuroses, or maybe it was true.  Assuming it was true, no amount of anti-discrimination laws, no amount of guaranteed interview schemes, and no amount of ‘empowerment’ of the disabled can fix what’s inside someone’s mind. 

That’s not intended to sound like some people’s minds are warped – in almost all cases, I generally don’t see any malice in people thinking that way, because when push comes to shove, I’ve always been an idealist.  I grew up with people saying things like ‘don’t trust anyone’, but I always felt I could be different to that.  In all my travels and stories I’ve detailed, that’s hopefully come across. I didn’t walk out of the door thinking that people are wonderful and will always help, care, or be nice, but ultimately, I reacted to what I found out there in the world. Most people are basically good. They might have viewed me as different or in need of help, and I might not have liked that at the time, but they just did what they thought they needed to do.  From reading the stories alone, you’d see how many times people helped me when I needed it.  So yeah, people are good.  So when someone didn’t want me for a job, or didn’t want to date me, or told me I couldn’t do something, I didn’t resent any of that, no matter how much it seemed like the obvious thing to do.

But ‘do you wish you were normal?’ – that’s a tough question.  First of all, you’d have to tell me what normality is, because I don’t know.  If it means approach to life, set of morals, sense of humour, then think even if I was able-bodied, I wouldn’t be ‘normal’.  So then, when someone asks me that, does normal mean ‘able-bodied’?  If it does…I don’t think I wish for that. I mean, I wish for all the things I just said, but not all of them are impossible.  Most things, I just have to find a way to do them.  Some things, I can’t do, and I had to learn to be OK with that.  For the most part, I am.

I’ve always thought that what people mean by ‘normal’ is something like ‘do I wish I’d been able bodied from the start?’ – and I’ve given that one a lot of thought.  Honestly? No, I don’t.  Being disabled has given me things that, had I been ablebodied, I don’t honestly know if I would’ve had, at least in the same way.  If I’d been able to live the same life most people have, would I have become the person I now, through all my experiences, know myself to be?  The one who understands struggles, can relate to people’s frustrations, who shows empathy and compassion?  Maybe I would’ve.  I certainly got raised well enough

I feel like I’ve always looked for new challenges.  The thing I wanted the most wasn’t to be ‘normal’ in a narrow sense, but to live something approaching a normal life.  But life tends to make you forget simple things like that.  When I was 18, I would’ve killed to be 31, with my own place, in a city I wanted to live in, living independently.  When I started writing this, that’s exactly who I was.  Somehow, that still doesn’t feel like enough.  Maybe it’s the pace of life – you’re rarely afforded any opportunities to

Would I like to be normal? I think in most ways, I probably am. Now I just need to work out how to be content with that.

Today’s not an article dripping in humour or happiness. It doesn’t even have any of my sarcastic asides. This is an article of anger. Perhaps not anger, actually – maybe just weariness.

Ultimately, I’m sick of football. I’m sick of it’s fans. I’m sick of the social media discourse around it – and very conscious that I’m adding to it here. I’m tired of the poison at the heart of football. The strange thing is, it’s not what people would normally consider it to be. It’s not oligarchs, Super Leagues, state-run sportswashing, or anything else, that I’m going to rant on today. There’s a more present threat to the game.

It’s this shit.

It’s not just that. It’s ‘The Sun was right, you’re murderers’. It’s ‘what about Heysel’. It’s booing minutes silences. It’s ‘Munich’. It’s ‘who’s that lying on the runway’. It’s ‘without killing anyone, we won it three times’ (sung by United players on the pitch at times). Or ‘always look out for Turks wielding knives’, or any of the other millions of chants. It’s fence-pushing gestures. All of the above, and more.

Full disclosure. I’m a Liverpool fan. I’ll make no bones about it in any article I write or anything I say on here. Does that cause me to lose some objectivity when it comes to analysing football? Maybe. But this isn’t football. This is petty pointscoring by the lowest members of society. It’s not right whichever club does it and for whatever reason. You’d think this would be an easy thing for people to figure out. Sadly, in todays social media, clickbait-dominated, world, it seems not. I write this today as a football fan, and a Liverpool fan. I’m probably more aware of what’s said to them than any other club, but I know enough about what’s sang at other clubs to comment on the practice as whole. By the way, no, I don’t think, for the avoidance of doubt, it’s any more right when a Liverpool fan does it to another club, so spare me any of that whataboutery and pearl-clutching.

However, while this has been on my mind for a while, I have to be honest; I’m writing, largely, in response to yesterday’s events. Liverpool were subjected to yet more chants about Heysel and Hillsborough as well as the vandalism shown above. Never mind, however, for the world’s foremost sports journalists have an explanation:

Let’s ignore for a second that these are Manchester-based journalists (I’m not sure it’s relevant and I hope it isn’t) – if I was a paid journalist, I would be absolutely fucking embarrassed to have that against my name. Are these people serious? Chants about deaths at a football match are abhorrent, regardless of a ‘manager’s comments’ or a bottle of Kopparberg thrown at a bus, or a spitting incident that never actually happened. It’s not justifiable. It has never been, it will never be. We can examine Klopp’s ‘xenophobia’ (answering a journalist’s question and not mentioning nationality or country) at another date. But right now, let’s focus on the chants about deaths.

There are those that would tell me ‘it’s football culture’ – to them, I would say, with all due respect, ‘what a load of absolute fucking bollocks’. I grew up around the game. My now-late Grandad was a player, manager, and enthusiast for many years at the grass roots level. My Dad was a player, and such an enthusiast that he cried when he saw me next to him at my first game. It meant something to us. It means something to a lot of people. Football, at it’s base, is a working class sport. It can be poisoned by money, foreign ownership, high ticket prices, TV companies, but at the base of it, it’s a sport enjoyed by working class people. Football culture was, and is, set by us – not by petty point scoring, not by jokes about deaths, not by ‘aye, but you’re worse bigots than us’ bullshit, but by the coming together of thousands towards a common goal. Not just that, but a respect between sides, a respect between fans. An understanding that we all came from the same place, and maybe that could be us out there too. That part of the world has changed, and we’re no longer watching our teams represented by those same working-class people from the areas we grew up in (with the odd exception, the likes of Rashford, Foden, and Trent Alexander-Arnold being breaths of fresh air in the money-dominated age), but we’re still the same people.

At some point – like most things, probably the 80s – this shifted, and it became ‘look at us, we’re better than you’. The Thatcher era in particular seemed to spawn a bunch of Loadsamoney types who were taking the piss out of the disenfranchised under that vile woman. Then, when football became socially acceptable for the cocaine set, it’s continued. There’s still that underpinning base of working class support, but sadly, it seems to have corrupted itself into the Toryfied way of looking at football. On balance, it’s perhaps no surprise we get the governments we do, we get the ignorance from the ruling classes we do, we get sneered at as we do, when people from Manchester are chanting about poverty towards people from Liverpool. It’s perhaps no surprise that the working class can never mobilise and fight for itself, when on Saturdays at 3pm, two sets of fans from ostensibly the same areas with the same problems are pointscoring over the deaths of human beings for 90 minutes. We’re all in the same river of shit. It’s about time we realised it.

Whatever the club and whatever the supposed whataboutery-based reasoning, I cannot understand the mentality of a human being who shows up at a sports match, and win or lose, they chant about the deaths or hardship of other human beings. I can’t understand it. Do the deaths of less children for your team than the other take away the pain of a 2-1 defeat? Does booing a minutes silence for 97 dead people from a similar background to you, who never got the justice they deserved, feed your family? Is your tax going to be lower because you chanted vile shite at your opponents? Is it fuck. You’re all the same, we’re all the same, we all love the sport, and it’s about more than this, or certainly fucking should be.

At various points over the last few years, for a variety of reasons, I’ve felt disillusioned with the game of football, it’s media, and the people within it. None have ever felt as final as today. Liverpool v Man City was a tremendous game of football yesterday, with controversy, atmosphere, and great skill. My team won. I should be made up. Somehow, I’m not. And it angers me. This article will probably be one of the most disjointed and maybe badly written I ever put out – but it’s come purely from anger, rage, and a desire for better. I hope you can see why, but frankly, I almost don’t care if you don’t.

In closing, a message to those thick fuckers doing this: every time you chant about a death, be it from Hillsborough, Heysel, Munich, Bradford, Istanbul, wherever…you make their families relive it. I hope that keeps you warm at night. It could’ve been you but for the grace of God and circumstance. The same’s true of life. Those you think are in poverty, bin dippers, etc etc….it can be you, if things ever go wrong for you. A hearty fuck you, and something to think about.

Til next time.

Feedback can be given via comment, tweet or email.

This show and everything surrounding it is one of my favourite memories of my entire life. It was the culmination of a lot of different things at one time – a show I genuinely cared about, groups of friends that wanted to see it, a flat move to the city I love over the horizon, great weather, and one of the few times I’ve felt consistently happy in my life. To see the full room that night, to do that show, to get that response, and to have that night out after – there hasn’t been a night full of more consistent highs in my life.

Mick Foley once wrote in his book (if you don’t know him, it’s okay, the quote is what matters) that after a big moment in his life, he was asked what his lowest point then was as a result. He replied ‘about twenty minutes later, when I knew I’d never feel that high again’. I don’t know that I knew that would be me that soon after, but with hindsight, this is where my love affair with comedy peaked, if not ended. There were other shows, there will be other shows again, there’s nights I still love it, there’s laughs I still have, and I still genuinely enjoy doing shows. But this, this show, for all intents and purposes, was the day I stopped taking comedy seriously or pursuing it as an endeavour.

There’s like a million reasons I could outline, and I’ll go through most of them. This is real now, raw, honest, not the jokes I make about hating comedians, even though, to be fair, most of them I do. Comedy for me was an escape. I started doing it as a way out of being a jobless, hopeless idiot after university. I kept doing it when I got my first job, and would wake up suicidal because I didn’t want to go to a horrible workplace where I was bullied and putdown every day. I kept doing it as my life improved. I kept doing it as I fell in love with people, as I made friends from it, as I had moments I’ll never forget.

I treasure the friends I have, the memories I made, and the moments like the 2000-person standing ovation (fuck you, it’s my post, it’s my humblebrag, and it’s the day I actually felt worth something after then 25 years on the earth). From the Frog and Bucket to fields in Cheshire, I felt privileged to say that I’d stood (well, kinda) in front of people and made them laugh. I’ve made people proud, I’ve become closer to people, I have the videos and photos to cherish, and I’ll never forget or regret it for one second.

Comedy was an escape, a place where I felt like I belonged, after years of not feeling like I did. I’m a cripple with depression – I’ve been disabled all my life, and I’ve suffered with depression on and off since I was 14/15 years old, by most sensible reckonings. It certainly wasn’t sensible or right for me to have death, suicide and sad thoughts on my mind as much as I did most of my teenage years and 20s, and it’s no less right now. But today isn’t about that – comedy was my escape. For 10/15/20 minutes at a time, I could make people laugh, and all that went away. The voices that tell me I’m nothing, that no one will ever love me, that no one truly cares for me (outside my family), that I’m tolerated – they went silent as soon as I told someone a joke. That’s incredibly powerful.

Unfortunately, like the person who hits the drug one too many times, or the person who falls out of the bittersweet love affair, the scales eventually fell from my eyes. A lot of things happened in my life since this show, and while people may not like what I say or how I word this – I can feel the angry messages hitting my inbox as I speak – the truth is in the way I feel and the words I say. Far too much of life is minimizing people’s feelings. They might not be accurate, they might not be based on anything, but they’re real to that person, and these are real to me.

The truth is, I wrote and performed a followup show to this. And it was fine. Fine is about the best word I can give it. I didn’t want to write any more. I didn’t really want to gig all that much. I’d fallen in love, I’d moved to live on my own for the first time ever, something I never thought I would do, and comedy just suddenly wasn’t that important. That approval I craved, that freedom I wanted, those crowd laughs, those trips where I was surviving on my own – they were all now contained in the people I saw every day, and the events, those independent moments I strived for, they were now inside the flat I owned, the place I had – something that was mine.

So suddenly, the idea of going on a trip to Stoke, to get pissed on with rain, to limp through train stations, to do 20 minutes on a Saturday night, and be told off because you did 25 by some wanker who thinks he’s ten men…well, that didn’t appeal. So I stopped. And my edge got blunt. I stopped writing, beyond a few ‘haha’ lines on Facebook. I churned out a show. But more than anything, I just wanted it all to get wrapped up nicely. I wanted the person I loved to love me. I wanted to keep my friends. And that was fine. That was my life.

Of course, this isn’t Hollywood, I live next door to Factory for fuck sake. And that’s what broke me. A few months after the second show, a large group of my friends I’d known a decade were gone. They’ve never come back. It was a misunderstanding over a few stupidly chosen words in humour and anger, and while I don’t miss their friendship any more, it does make me sad that we will most likely die still thinking the same thing we think of each other now – inscrutable, stubborn, arseholes who think the other person’s a cunt. That’s life. I tried to mend fences, they set them on fire. That’s their choice. I know now I can’t change that.

The hammer blow that followed was the loss of the person I loved. They’re not dead, and my best friend hates me saying it the way I have, but, well, they’re gone. I don’t need to go into why and wherefore. If you know me, you know who, you know what happened, and you know why. It’s been almost three years. Am I over it? If you tell me to be, for a while, I am. There’ve been other disasters since then romantically, as I’m fond of saying. But I did truly love them, and to be honest, the way it all ended with them, just after the friendships, just after forcing out a show I couldn’t write for – it all took away my last care about anything to do with standup, because it was now the art form that I had done out of love for my friends, love for her, and love for feeling like something – and most of that was now gone.

I still have tremendous friends, best friends, probably the greatest friends of my lifetime, who I love – my 30th stands out as a particular highlight – but I didn’t need to do comedy for them to love me, which worked out well, because I didn’t want to.

No one probably really knows this, because then the next thing happened – the pandemic, that we all know about. Overnight, an industry shut down. And that was great for me, because I didn’t give a fuck about being in it any more, but at the same time, it wasn’t like losing my parking space in a busy lot – no one was parking. So I sat on my arse for two years, got fatter, didn’t do any gigs, and watched the world burn. I could go into more detail about the pandemic, but you all know what it was like – I can’t add anything. I suffered with my mental health as I saw no one for months, I watched the world burn, and Boris had a fucking party. Cunts.

Anyway – as we were easing out of the pandemic, my Grandad passed away. I probably would’ve never told him this or anyone else in my family, but he was the guy I get the humour you see from me either in person or on stage from. He was always japing around, making me laugh. I know he was proud to see what I could do on stage. My whole family is of course – but with him gone, it just means a little less.

It was while I was grieving him that the scales fell from my eyes again, sometime after the 15000th conspiracy theorist post on Facebook or the zillionth podcast featuring the same clique of people who get most of the shots – and I deleted 200 comedians from Facebook. Some I knew, some I never met, some I’ll never meet. But in many ways, it was the best day of my life. I freed myself from all that negative thought above and really didn’t give a fuck if I did comedy again.

From being an escape, comedy now felt and feels like the refuge of the ones who shout the loudest and piss the highest, with very few exceptions. The top of the industry was never something I was likely to reach, I can be honest with myself about that – I wasn’t good enough.

I am a top of the middle, bottom of the top kind of comic. I’m a good comic some nights. I’ve hit great on maybe 3 or 4 occasions. But I know in my heart I won’t put the time and effort in to be any better, and even if I did, I’m not sure the ability is there. But even the top of my local scene and scenes around it seem to be populated with the very people I came into comedy to escape. I wanted out.

So I did. And I’ve never looked back. And the further we get from this show, four years ago, the less I care, and the more I’m glad I don’t chase it any more.

I haven’t and won’t “retire”, but you’ll probably never see me on the scene regularly again. That said, like the mafia and pro wrestling, comedy has a way of pulling you in just as you thought you were out. There are some wonderful people in comedy, including but not limited to the likes of Neil Shawcross, Neil Elston, Dan Barnes, Matt Davenport, Rick Hulse, Danny Sutcliffe, Jack Kelly, Tony Basnett, Mark Grimshaw, Tony Wright, all the Blizzard group, particularly Jonny…and those are the spots I love doing. I rarely, if ever, will say no to them. And I’ll support them. I’ll be around. I’ll promote it. I’ll try. Some nights, I may even hit a level I consider to be above average again. And I’ll smile, and go home, and I’ll remember when I took it seriously.

But it will never, ever, ever, be like this night again. And that’s the bit I’ve been coming to terms with – and now I have to work out what’s next. Not just in comedy, but in life. I feel dreadfully unfulfilled. I have to find a way to fix that.