We've been to watch a live performance of a podcast we both listen to, called Regular Features, which is a collection of mostly ex and current games journalists making each other laugh with a combination of high brow and scatological humour. It has a small core listenership, of mostly women with coloured hair and shuffling men in check shirts carrying satchels, and obviously Mike and I love it.
We got the coach down at 10am, a torturous journey of safety alarms continuously drilling into our brains and toilets not being flushed and splashing everywhere when we turned a corner. So, every National Express journey ever then.
We spent the day shuffling around London with out check shirts and satchels, eating brioche and being shat on by geese. Turns out cotton wool is not the best cleaning material with which to remove bird excrement from your suede trainers (sorry Mike).
The show itself was great, but very intimate, and I felt nervous. I get sweaty and terrified in performance things with a small audience. I think it's partly my mirror neurons firing with sympathetic anxiety for the performers, and partly that there's more chance of my own involvement in the show.
Case in point: Gav Murphy started proceedings asking if it was anyone's first time, and I put my hand up. He asked what I was looking forward to most, and I felt a cavernous space opening before me, an absolute emptying of my mind, a desire to run a million miles away. I muttered something about "All of it," to which Gav replied that I hadn't given him much to work with there. They moved on. I sat for the next ten minutes just utterly despising myself.
But the show was funny. Joe's feature was about a flat-Earther he'd run into on a stag do. Steve's was about Westworld sex robots. Gav did a bit about infiltrating a coal mining remembrance group on Facebook. And Log, who I half love and half am in love with, got the group to perform a smutty panto ostensibly written by Jim Davidson as Log himself narrated from the point of view of Davidson as if providing DVD commentary, a broken man looking for catharsis in a world he couldn't comprehend. It was great.
Afterwards Mike and I hid in the corner of the pub below the theatre and watched the performers coming down to the bar. We were about to skulk off, too shy to interact - - literally we were standing up to go -- when I caught the eye of Gav turning towards me, and we did a little nod at each other, and then next moment we were shaking hands and he and Joe were thanking us for coming and asking how we'd liked it. Then they were amazed, and a little apologetic, to find we'd come all the way from Sheffield to see them. And then we were in the group chatting to people, albeit awkwardly.
We met a lovely girl with coloured hair called Hannah, and her partner, whose name I forget, and the four performers, who were all sweet. Gav was kind and shy in person. Joe and Steve were clever and confident, and Log was soft and lovely and brilliant, exactly as I'd imagined. They were all disarming.
But I don't know. There's something about seeing in the flesh the people that you aspire to be that can, if you have low self-esteem, make you feel really shitty. Like, they all write so well, and work or worked for amazing publications, and are so intelligent and dedicated and brave. And then here's little old me.
I've been feeling I've been doing well writing this blog, but next to these guys it's all just rubbish.
But maybe it's about that thing of not trying to be someone else. Work really hard and you might just about be able to be yourself. So why not focus on that, and let other people focus on being themselves.
I like writing this little blog. It's better for me than not writing it. Beyond that, who cares? It'll go wherever it's meant to go.
It's so late now and I can't write any more words. I'm going to get some sleep on the coach now. Until tomorrow.
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