Lo! friends,
Before I launch into my regular spew, I just wanted to spoon you a piping-hot ladle of admin, with a deep-fried side-dish of REAL TALK.
Next week, I am beginning the first dates of my first ever stand-up tour. When I finish it in October I will of course get a tattoo of the word HUBRIS on my cheek*, but for now, I must continue to ask you to come and see it.
The most important dates currently are next week (July 31st + Aug 1st) when I'm at the SOHO THEATRE in London. Tickets for those two shows are available here.
For the more supportive amongst you, I'd say the Monday is the less audience-dense of the two performances as things stand. So do with that what you will, depending on how much you treasure intimacy. The Tuesday is looking like it might (fingers crossed) sell out so I'd get on that pronto if you're planning on coming then.
Other dates incoming:
AUGUST 5th - OXFORD
SEPT 6th - BRIGHTON
SEPT 12th - MANCHESTER
SEPT 16th - EDINBURGH
OCT 13th - BRISTOL
I'm sorry to keep selling this show to you all. Promoting things all the time is the literal opposite of a life. But I love this show. And I'd love you all to see it. It began way back before the pandemic so it's really polished and delicious by now. I think it has some interesting questions to ask about big things that might matter to you - love and relationships and belief, what codes we choose to live our life by - and it also has a joke about farts in it now too. Bottom line: if you like this mailer, you'll like the show. Please do come, or recommend it to someone you know.
Speaking of which, I've been thinking a lot about selling things recently. A few weeks ago I was taking a walk through the City of London on a Sunday which, because all the bankers have gone back to Surrey for the weekend to golf the cocaine out of their system**, is dead quiet. That kind of absence affords you a bit more focus and, casting my eye about, it really struck me that every gorgeous old building in London, designed with purpose and a considered aesthetic a hundred years ago or so, now has an itsu in it. Every Victorian marvel - handsome department stores, tailors, haberdashers*** from the previous century - is now a hollowed-out carapace from which Joe can peddle his Juice. I'm too busy to clock it normally but, with dawdling time in hand to notice, the mismatch is quite hard to look at. Something so commercial inside something so beautiful.
It's such a strange feeling. Imagine picking up a Jurassic seashell on the dusky beaches of the Dorset Coast, a great big one, the size of your hand. Its curves are beautiful, the Golden Ratio manifest in ancient marine bone, its Fibonacci whirls and taperings hewn not from human calculus but by the convectional toss and tumble of the ocean floor, and by millennia of genetic backgammon. You put your ear to the conch's quiet, tempting, capacious interior, to hear the sound of the waves, but a whisper from the nereids. The sound of a helicopter. Over the whirring turbines Simon Pegg is yelling, 'Tom's done it again'. The shell is playing a radio advert for Mission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning Part 1.
Next to the itsu, big luxury skyscrapers. The base floor of which displays residential showroom pictures of their penthouse suits. Rooms that look immaculate. Rooms that are designed to look good without humans in them. As soon as you imagine a human in them, it ruins the picture. The hexagonal matching lime green water glass and carafe, the synthetic neon-purple reed floral vase display. Furniture that bulges with geometry but would wholly and completely fail to support a human butt. Every table and surface is sculptural, abstract statuary for a religion we couldn't possibly understand, props for a play that will never happen. And in the background, a skyline view made of the same shapes. Indecisiveness, discomfort, sweatiness do not exist in that room. Nor do they exist in the version of London that the aspirational pictures gesture to.
I can't imagine feeling anything in that room. I wish they wouldn't make those kinds of rooms.
And obviously I know why they do it.
And obviously
And obviously
And obviously
Property as a wealth sink, holding onto money like a peat bog holds onto bodies. But there are symptoms of that greed: so much of modern urban life is navigating how much to relent to these pallid simulacra of actual experience. Gym treadmills that go nowhere. Homes that you can't feel at home in. Cocktails that promise conviviality and exoticism but deliver a tumbler full of sugar and a bill on a little silver platter, in the reflection of which you can see your hangover waving at you from the future.
What scares me is I am not entirely unattracted to it all.
I am coming to the realisation that I love to be sold things. Or at least, I love to be influenced. I love adverts. Perhaps it's no huge surprise to me as they have featured regularly in my stand-up. But when friends tell me it doesn't matter if we'll be a little late for the cinema because 'there's twenty minutes of commercials'****, a little bit of serotonin bubbles out my ear and floats away like a balloon. And I don't just mean the trailers, by the way. I love pre-movie car adverts with a passion. Well, not a passion. With a passiveness. I find footage of a Toyota sailing through a computer-generated pan-Asian rice field incredibly soothing. When I see Audis displayed shinily on the roofs of San Francisco-y tower blocks, even though there's no feasible way they could ever have got up there, I have the feeling, and there's no way to explain this, that my cholesterol is lowering in real time. My heart, at first fluttering in anticipation of the popcorn I am about to lob down my neck (within and without), begins to beat slower. The stupid, screen-saver-esque dance the marketing team have had to perform in order to convey the concepts of speed and comfort, is a total brain jacuzzi. I stare at those adverts the same way a cribbed baby gazes at a mobile of a rocket ship.
In fact, over the course of my life, I have been exposed to thousands of hours of adverts. It probably isn't too much of an exaggeration to say that I have laid eyes on the Welsh Go Compare opera singer's face more than I have made eye contact with certain members of my own family. The result of such mental waterboarding is that, in my head at least, all adverts exist on the same ontological plane*****. They are all interconnected. An extended universe that, while I live my life here in reality, continues backstage. Adland. A location where Ronald McDonald knows the Coco Pops monkey who in turn knows JUST EAT Katy Perry. The Compare the Market Meerkat is in a heated discussion with Kevin Bacon about the vice-like grip he's held in by his EE contract. The various purpose-built fluffy John Lewis Christmas mascots have a support group. It's a very beguiling place that glistens with lens flare, and thrums with narrative finitude, where every problem is solved, every knot unknotted, every negative emotion arcs purposefully towards being positive again. Your marriage will always be fixed with soft furnishings. Your mixed-race friend group will never miss the World Famous Pop Group Concert Experience again.
And that's all fine while it's a fiction. But the older I get, the more its colours and emotions, its purchasable experiences and quantified 'moments' ooze into reality and become very real aspirations for me in my life. No, I am not going to buy an Audi after watching a trailer at the movies. But that's because I simply can't afford to. If I had the wherewithal, would the rising damp of possibility seep into me? The desire for clean edges and soft furnishings to solve my darned marriage? Would my drawbridge, like my pounding, pre-cinema heartbeat, lower?
Put your ear to the sea-conch. Is that the idea of a penthouse calling?
* I'll leave it up to your mind's eye which cheek
**sadly, not what crazy golf actually is, I'm informed
***I'll be honest I refuse to Google this one. I know it is a real word. But what does it mean? Let's just enjoy saying it for now. Haberdashers. Haberdashers! Haberdashers.
****ok my social circle is overwhelmingly British so they don't say 'commercials', they definitely say 'adverts', but I'm trying to break the US market, and you know what, it pays to be generic, Trans-Atlantic and relatable. So commercials it is. Pop tarts. Pre-game. Aluminum. Deal with it.
***** in excess of 110% sure I am misusing the phrase 'ontological plane'. Please do get in touch if you think you know what I'm actually trying to say.
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Feeling generous?
If you’ve got spare honk, why not consider giving to one of these amazing charities?
Child Poverty Action Group - 8 children in a classroom of 30 are in poverty! The Child Poverty Action Group works with schools to make changes like recycled uniform schemes and free breakfasts. Donate now so children in poverty can make the most of school life!
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What a read.... If it makes you feel any better, haberdasher is very much a word. It's a person who deals in small items. Mainly things to do with clothing - like zips and buttons. John Lewis and Liberty's have whole departments dedicated to haberdashery. There is also a worshipful company of haberdasher's based in the City of London. You might have passed their building during your walk? I'm guessing that you went past the Bloomberg building which is insane, but there are also little side roads and churches that are old and interesting. It can be comforting to visit some of them because they have been around for so long and they remind you that things can survive difficult things over time, so maybe you can too? But that might just be because I work in housing and planning. Aaaaanyhoo. Great read and looking forward to your show next week.