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don't try this at home

Thursday 23rd April 2009

I forget whether it was during the 2006 or 2007 Edinburgh fringe, but one afternoon I was sitting in front of one of my favourite Edinburgh haunts from my uni days, Negociants Café, when I saw something remarkable.  The street Negs (as we used to call it) is on is a dual carriageway, and on the central reservation-bit there are a couple of those waist-high steel boxes which contain circuit breakers and the like for traffic lights.  As I drank my coffee (it will have been coffee; back when I was a student Negs was the first place I ever saw or used a cafétiere so I enjoy their coffee for nostalgic reasons, above and beyond the fact that it's good coffee) a young man on a mountain bike came hurtling directly toward these boxes.  Astonishingly, he neither smashed into nor jumped over the boxes, rather he and his bike, at the last second before impact, sprang into the air and landed deftly on TOP of the first box, balanced up there on one wheel for a few seconds, then hopped across onto the SECOND box, balanced, then hopped down to the ground and sped off on his way, to the sound of rapturous applause from the assembled gobsmacked onlookers.

Edinburgh's so replete with performers pulling off guerilla promotional stunts during the festival that I think most of those who saw this assumed that it was something along those lines, despite the fact that the man neither paused to hand out flyers nor did he appear to have any accomplices along to do so for him.  He just did his stunt and disappeared, and I've often wondered who he was.

Well thanks to bbc.co.uk I now know that he's called Danny Mackaskill, and that thanks to YouTube he's become a bit of a global phenomenon. This is him here:

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weight

Monday 20th April 2009

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it's been a bad week

Sunday 19th April 2009

Sorry you haven't heard much from me this week; it's been a trying few days here at Benn Towers...  Had some very sad news this week (nothing I feel like going into the specifics of, if you don't mind) which in turn gave rise to some slightly surreal scheduling complications, while all the time having to maintain my comedy mojo at a sufficient level to do a bunch of gigs and write a bunch of songs despite not being even remotely in the mood. 

Anyway, life goes on, and today at least provided a fun afternoon at the "Victorian" (rather more 1960s if you ask me) funfair on Ham Common.  This seems to have been designed with us - or more specifically, Greta - in mind.  All the rides were safe and size-appropriate for her, and there was a notable absence of the hordes of intimidating yoofs who generally populate funfairs (probably precisely because this one is all a bit kiddie-ish for them).  Greta seems to be genuinely utterly fearless; she relished every minute of every ride, even the slightly hair-raising rotary swing-thing, and flung herself down the big bouncy slide with such vigour she nearly bounced herself clean off of it and out into mid-air. 

Meanwhile, this has turned up on YouTube; it's nicely done and I'm quite proud of this song so it's gratifying that "upsetmama" has taken the time to do this:

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shame on me

Tuesday 14th April 2009

I did weigh myself this (Monday as far as I'm concerned) morning; the bad news is I've gone up another pound (Easter).  The worse news is that nobody (so far) has emailed to tell me off!  Come on, guys, I'm in danger of slipping badly here and if I start to suspect I'm unsupervised I may well end up undoing all the good you've helped me do so far...

End of whinge, and I don't want to sound like I'm blaming anyone else for my current staying-on-wagon difficulties (although I probably am), and it's a Bank Holiday so you've all been off doing fun things (I tend not to notice Bank Holidays; when you're self-employed with no school-age kids they don't really make any difference) and it's no-one else's responsibility when it comes down to it...

Bollocks, ignore me.  Good Easter was it?

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planet of the vin diesel box-sets

Sunday 12th April 2009

As is the custom nowadays, didn't see Doctor Who until after the kiddies were in bed.  We never see it go out live anymore; this is of course purely in order that we might vet it for scariness before we let Greta anywhere near it, and NOT because she would inevitably talk all the way through it, possibly resulting in me going a bit The Shining on her ass.

Well, it sort of WAS Pitch Black on a bus, wasn't it, but by no means the worse for that.  Michelle Ryan seemed to be going for the same kind of aloof sexiness as Diana Rigg in The Avengers, but, like Diana Rigg in The Avengers, generally came over as unbearably smug (you still wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers, mind you).  DT just reminded me how much the show and the public are going to miss him (no pressure, young Matt).  Weird that Lee Evans went for a slightly variable Welsh accent when there's been a preponderance of genuine (and frequently incongruous) Welsh accents throughout New Who.  Nice that he got a proper Lee Evans moment with the fire extinguisher. 

Didn't see it in all its HD glory, unfortunately; the V+ box can record in HD but it eats up so much disk space that it stops working properly until you delete whatever it is you've recorded.  Hope it gets repeated on the HD channel - the desert location looked wonderful but - sorry - kind of CG-ish...  Not sure the Mill boys couldn't have produced an equally convincing desert, but then the DW gang wouldn't have gotten their Dubai jolly (not that there's anything particularly jolly about Dubai - went there myself once.  Once.)  

Meanwhile, Waters Of Mars, eh?  Like the title.

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Stuck with an Orange mobile...

Friday 10th April 2009

As my Twitterers will know, I'm on something of the horns of a mobile phone dilemma;  my little Sony Ericsson is, I fear, in a decline. It's started to switch itself off at random intervals, for no immediately discernible reason and at least once with disastrous timing.  It's patently not long for my pocket and I'll need another one shortly.

The recent demise of my old Palm LifeDrive leads me to wish to replace my ailing phone with some sort of smartphone/PDA thingy rather than just a phone phone-type phone. Right now I'm using my iPod's calendar function as my diary which is a bit dodgy as I can only read it; I can't amend it until I get home and make the necessary alterations on my iMac's calendar and then back up the iPod, if you follow (and I understand if you don't, or choose not to).

The thing is, being an iMac user I've decided I would like to suck it up and finally go for the iPhone if only because I KNOW it'll sync up with the Mac.  I know other smart-phones and Palm-tops can be made to sync up with Macs, like my old Palm LifeDrive, but it's generally by means of some shonky bit of shareware which never works properly and gums up your hard drive for ever, like my old Palm LifeDrive.

However...  I appear to be signed up to Orange for the rest of my life and thus far, one can only (strictly legitimately) use an iPhone on O2. I know I can always bail on Orange and switch networks, but possibly not for free and probably not without changing my mobile number which I'd be very reluctant to do - I've had the same mobile number for 12 years, during which time I've had six different addresses and six different landline numbers - it's the main way people in the "business" know how to get in touch with me and changing it now would be a major hassle.

I'm fairly sure I can persaude Orange to give me a Blackberry, and I'd be perfectly happy with a Blackberry, were it not for this connectivity issue.  I've found conflicting accounts on the net and had conflicting advice on Twitter, so here I am asking for yet more conflicting advice; does anybody out there know - really KNOW - how well you can sync up a Blackberry with a Mac?  And do they REALLY sync up, or is it just a botch compromise using some shonky bit of shareware which never works properly and etc. etc. etc.

Mind you, my old pal and comrade Emma Kennedy informs me by Tweet than come July there will be Orange-friendly iPhones available.  Can anyone confirm this?  If true it may be worth my while hanging on till then.

Thoughts?

Thanks.

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sorry

Tuesday 7th April 2009

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hello and ow

Sunday 5th April 2009

Well I'm back... Actually I've been back since Wednesday evening, but immediately upon my return I had to throw myself into Now Show songwriting duties (our return flight was delayed by four hours; thought I'd get the whole evening to work but in the event I didn't get in until knocking on for 10pm); then Thursday itself (the bit I was awake for) was devoted in its entirety to recording The Now Show; then Friday, being the first real day "back in reality", was spent trying to nail back down the various bits of hell that had broken loose in our absence, and ascertaining just how much financial chaos you can actually plunge yourself into by disappearing for five days (surprising amounts, it turns out) before going to Cranleigh Arts Centre for a restoringly good gig, then on Saturday we persuaded the in-laws to come over and babysit while we ran round performing some very overdue errands, of a kind that simply can't be performed with two little girls in tow, pausing only to make an offer on a house we liked the look of, then hurrying (rather too quickly, according to a member of Her Majesty's Constabulary - oh well, it's just money... and points) to a gig at Soho Ho, which was nearly cancelled as a result of a restaurant a few doors down Frith Street bursting into flames shortly before showtime.

This is why it's taken me three days to get round to blogging.  But here I am.

If the tone of this blog thus far has been surprisingly chipper given that content-wise it's been something of a catalogue of hassles, that may be because I still haven't stopped grinning since I got back from Méribel.   I wasn't sure what to expect from this trip at all, but I know I didn't exepct to have quite the best time I've had in years, if not ever.  From the moment we arrived we were spoilt rotten; we had our own little hotel apartment ( a real boon if you have kiddies - we were in a "family room" in Malta about 18 months ago, which is fine in theory but as soon as you've put the kids to bed you're stuck in there with them in darkness and silence), we were on permanent freebies at "Evolution", one of the best restaurants in town, we had free ski passes for every day of our stay and Greta and I had free private ski classes.

I'm not sure which will seem less probable to you; little three year old Greta learning to ski or enormous thirty-nine year old me, but we both did, and by our third and final day of classes we were doing proper skiing down a proper mountain and everything.  Really.  There are photos.

Better still, Clara - who learned to ski as a kid - got some decent skiing done in the afternoons (being chummed down the slopes by various comedy pals of ours), while I looked after the girls. I was so glad of this; I had a horrid vision of Clara - the only one of us who could already ski - going all the way to Méribel and being stuck minding the kids all day while Captain Incompetent here hurtled about injuring himself and others. 

I'm still a bit annoyed that I didn't have the gumption to take the week off from The Now Show and spend the whole week in Méribel - the Altitude festival was, if anything, just really kicking into its stride when I left. 

The festival itself is a gloriously freewheeling affair; I found myself doing kids' shows, shows in French (more or less) and live games of Just A Minute (as part of the wonderfully oxymoronic "Stars Of Radio 4" evening).  Tuesday night saw what was by any objective measure the "big deal" gig of the festival; a full set from KT Tunstall and her band, for the finale of which she got all the comedians there present - including Marcus, Andew Maxwell, Andre Vincent, Nick Doody and myself - to join her on stage for Suddenly I See.  It was my first gig as a back-up dancer and while I can't even begin to imagine how it looked from the audience's point of view, there were a lot of cameras and phones in the audience so I wouldn't be surprised if it turned up on YouTube in the near future.

Earlier that evening I got a quick interview with KT which I'll incorporate into my next podcast. She was extraordinarily friendly and voluble, considering she was the only genuinely famous one among us. 

In fact, one of the most enjoyable features of the whole stay was the evident rigour with which the Arsehole Filter had been applied; at any sizeable gathering of comedians there's always at least one who can be relied upon to make an utter tit of himself and ruin the mood, or go off on some cocaine-and-ego fuelled rant against some fellow comic (often in the room at the time) or something along those lines, but on this occasion everyone there was one of my favourite people on the circuit. Over the course of the festival more and more people I was genuinely pleased to see turned up, and no-one with so much as a hint of uh-oh about them appeared.  In fact the person I was most surprised to find in such universally respected company was me. 

While my mind has nothing but fond recollections of my stay, my body's not so sure. Skiing has a way of exacting its revenge upon you in a slow and stealthy manner; just down off the mountain, you're buzzing and exhilarated and very alive.  The next morning, you notice bruises you don't remember incurring and bits of you have started to seize up; the only cure is to get back up the mountain.  As soon as you head for home, thus depriving yourself of daily mountain therapy, your body starts to go into a steady decline...  since we returned, every morning I've been slightly stiffer and achier than the last.  It's wearing off a bit now, but I find I still have Skiers' Arse - alarmingly steely buttocks which could crush a man's skull but which are quite incapable of climbing stairs.

In any event, I've promised Marcus I'll do whatever I can to help him bring attention to next year's Altitude. This year already saw (I'm told) a marked improvement attendance-wise on last year, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the festival gets the audience it deserves.  It's immense fun in a heartbreakingly beautiful place, which is not a bad combination.

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hello and goodbye (for a bit)

Saturday 28th March 2009

Hi all,

Sorry I've been a bit absent this week, and it's not about to get any better I'm afraid... I've been especially busy these past few days as tomorrow (well, later today now) the family and I are off to Méribel in France for a few days (as you'll know if you're a regular), and this has required a lot of running about getting things sorted.  I'm not sure what net access I'll have so I may not blog again until Wednesday or Thursday.  In particular I'm pre-excusing myself from posting my weight on Monday, so there.

I may still get the odd tweet off, for the Twitterers among you.

Thanks for your support and patience; I'll see you in a few days, ski-related disasters notwithstanding.

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weigh day again

Monday 23rd March 2009

20st 12, so two more pounds gone.

I actually ate hardly anything for the whole of Friday and Saturday this week (my "ill" feeling having evolved into a "sick" feeling, for some reason) so on the one hand, I might have expected to have lost more, but when you actually eat NOTHING for a while, your body goes into "starvation mode" and your weight remains much the same (while you yourself feel sluggish and dreadful as you're essentially "running on empty").  As it is, I reckon two pounds is about fair.

I THINK I'm finally over this illness, but we'll see.  Hope so; thoroughly bored with it.

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