Lo! Friends!
‘Hmmmmm?’ you might be thinking. ‘An email? From Ben and Will? Why? How? What are they up to now? These emails only rock up in my inbox when they’re trying to peddle me something, or, worse, when one of them gets ill and suddenly has a lot of time on their hands to sit around daydreaming, sipping tea, doing circles on their swivel chair with the hope the centripetal force will coagulate some good metaphors in their brain. So which is it? Go on! Spill the beans!’
Good news! It’s both! Not only do I have a couple of shows coming up for which I would love you to buy tickets (more info on those at down at the murky bottom of this email), I’m also currently in recovery from having my appendix removed over the weekend, which has rendered me largely housebound for a fortnight, and also gives me carte-blanche to use dramatic phrases like ‘in recovery’ and ‘housebound’ and ‘murky bottom’ to elicit (milk) sympathy (pity) from strangers (my customer base).
To be very clear, I’m mostly absolutely fine. As the incredibly kind, generous and overworked nurses on the ward pointed out to me ad infinitum (I imagine they’re not allowed to do anything ad nauseum, it’s counterproductive), I am young (reasonably), healthy (unbelievably) and was having the most simple, regular, workaday procedure you can have. Surgeons could do appendix removal in their sleep (and definitely in mine). For these statistical reasons, at one point, one of the medics called me The Golden Patient - a phrase I obviously immediately took as a personal compliment, and stored away to tell you guys now. The nurses said I was a good boy!
For the completists among you, I went into A&E - which some people think stands for Accident and Emergency but is actually just what a scream looks like phonetically - A&E!! - on Friday with a pain in my stomach that made me, for a split second, question whether I might have accidentally swallowed some napalm, or at least a small bundle of Japanese kitchen knives. And after a whirlwind evening of being diagnosed by Denmark Hill’s finest - some of them doctors, some of them just fellow patients with some very spicy opinions - I was told my appendix was being voted out of the Big Brother House.
Appendices are hilarious. The mystery organ. No idea why they’re there. You only ever hear about them when they’ve cocked up and ruined everything. They’re like that one guy in your class at school who you thought was just incredibly reserved and quiet because they were cool or wise or just above it all, and then one day they open their mouth to talk in a lesson and it’s absolute fucking garbage and they immediately get expelled. It’s such a silly piece of the body. It’s literally called ‘the appendix’. The etc. The misc. Anatomists categorised the whole body, were about to close it and then they found, IKEA-home-construction-style, a bit on the side. I was thrilled to lose the thing and was put on the table the following morning to lose some weight in the most exciting and specific way possible.
They discharged me on Sunday and, well, do I feel different now? Without an appendix? Totally. I feel streamlined. When I move now, it’s smooth like a BMW. I feel like a laptop that’s just had its cookies cleared. No hangers on! No stowaways! No deadwood! I run a tight ship! Everyone here pulls their weight! Specifically, my weight, which, after several BMI tests in the hospital, I now know to the gram. Sure, at the moment I can only eat soup and I was told verbatim by one of the medical professionals not to lift anything heavier than a kettle (vague! a kettle? Full or empty? Filled with what? Water? Stones? More soup?), but even just mentally I feel lighter. The surgeons did some judicious editing and removed an unnecessary coda. Sometimes you have to kill your darlings. And sometimes those darlings are your internal organs. Brevity is, after all, the soul.
More of Will’s cartoons?
Pore through the hallowed archive of Will’s website here!
More of Ben’s nonsense?
Rummage through the bargain bin of Ben’s website here!
Ben’s Gigs
With my fingers crossed several times (fingers plaited I suppose), I will be up and raring to record an album of standup this month - for those of you worried you might have seen a lot of the material before, well, it’s now almost certainly going to involve a lot of me talking about my bloody appendix, and it’s probably going to be one of my first shows back after surgery, so the stakes are pretty high and weird! I’m also going to have support from one of my best pals Alex MacKeith who is a disgustingly talented musical comedian. Please Lord get some tickets here:
12th October - 8pm SPECIAL RECORDING SHOW @ The Star of Kings
Also, Al and I will be returning to our ancestral home of The Bill Murray pub in Angel on Oct 30th to do our third and final seasonal show of the year. It’ll be more songs and stories and pillocking about, with a line-up to die for, all on the night before Halloween. Don’t be whatever the Halloween equivalent of a Scrooge is! Come say hi:
30th October - Alex & Ben’s Spooky Wooky Hallow’eve Ghost Carousel
Feeling generous?
If you’ve got spare honk, why not consider giving to one of these amazing charities?
BPAS - this charity has been in my mind a lot recently; one of my colleagues at the bookshop I work at staged a rehearsed reading of a play to raise funds for abortion services in the UK, which are once again under threat from the new government, and BPAS do excellent and wide-ranging work in that area. Donate if you can - it’s an extremely important cause
Parkinson’s UK - Parkies provides care and support across the UK for people with Parkinson’s, and fund research into a cure. They do incredible work! People with Parkinson’s tend to be 50+ and depend on regular contact with others, so have been hit really hard this year. Please consider donating!
If you have a charity close to your heart, however big or small, and want to include it here {or you wanna get in touch for whatever reason!} - just send us an email benpope86@gmail.com or Tweet at us @LoAnEmail