34: Concentration

I've tried to write pesky blog number 34 for quite some time now, and I keep getting distracted by the tiniest of things - such is the wafer thin level of concentration in my noggin.

As all of these little notes are dedicated to things that I hate, I had previously tried to write about about a dozen little things but kept going off track somewhat and deciding that I hated something else even more. Then I'd eat a bakewell slice, have a nap and play Portal 2 for a bit.

My first idea was to talk about people who wear glasses when they don't need them. I have - despite many warnings from my mother about various teenage activities that would limit my vision - 20/20 vision. I know. I'm as stunned as you, to be honest.

I know a lot of people that rock a pair of glasses, and in many ways I am jealous of their awesome face furniture. Glasses are cool, no doubt about it. But I have been led to believe by the lady in the laser eye surgery commercial that it's possibly slightly preferable to have working eyes. After all, she looks so happy. After just two hours!

I'm not sure if people who wear glasses get as annoyed about this as me, but the only people who wear glasses without prescription lenses in them tend to be girls that think they're alternative because they once bought a fairisle knit cardigan from the Cancer Research shop and guys who have stupid hair and pretend to read Dostoyevsky on the tube. Cunts.

Then there's Radio 1.

As a former BBC employee I used to be limited in what I say about Radio 1, however as I'm now as free as a bird let me speak out on a couple of subjects:

1: It's not a "music festival" if all of the bands that are playing have essentially been chosen because they represent 80% of your daytime playlist.
2: I'm not that happy at you fuckers spending the license fee (that could be dedicated to you know, actually saving local radio) on putting on said "festival" and then mentioning it in every link for six weeks before and after the so-called event.
3: Fearne Cotton is the worst presenter in the world.
4: Greg James is the second worst.

Of course, this isn't as annoying as the new opening credits for the Simpsons.

Why change it? Yes, it jumped the shark ages ago (series 10, "The Principal and the Pauper") but I could still watch old episodes and bask in their timeless humour (something that Family Guy will never be able to do). Now there's an opening credits that tries to make minor characters important (the fucking one eyebrowed baby? Fuck you), has Sherri and Terri playing on Nintendo DSs and somehow manages to make a programme that is now in HD and better animated than ever look as cheap as a Primark wedding dress.

Not to mention that all new episodes of the Simpsons seem to follow the same formula:

Homer does something dumb
This leads to them going to a different place
Episode takes place in different place (Ireland, Italy, Africa, the Midwest)
Mild racism and minor wackiness ensues.

Don't even get me started on bicycle seats.

Riding a bike is fun, right? So why should the seat make me feel like I've been violated by an angry bear that is wearing that spiked sheathed from the film Seven?

Also, women who go out walking at a slow pace whilst wearing leggings, anoraks and carrying a bottle of water: That is NOT proper exercise. Try running. Or walking further than the small loop near your house with two of your friends talking about Emmerdale. Get out of my cycle lane.

I forget what this was about. Oh yes. Concentration, that's it.

Nope, I've got nothing.

But I will enjoy a bakewell slice.

http://twitter.com/jimsmallman

33: Brainache

I'd love to paint the image that I'm some kind of happy-go-lucky comedian that people tend to hope that all of my breed are; spending my downtime whistling showtunes or getting into scrapes like a heavily tattooed Norman Wisdom. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

I've not done any kind of survey amongst comedians, but I'm fairly sure that the majority - even if it's only 51% of us - are mentally ill in some way. Either keeping to themselves (as I have no doubt my Mother wishes I did) or like me, being a big old show pony about it.

I'm not proud of being bipolar, I don't view it as a selling point or anything like that. I mean, how could it be one? Imagine my agent ringing people up trying to get gigs for me purely based on that:

JON: Fancy booking Jim for a gig?
PROMOTER: Not seen him before, what's he like?
JON: He can be quite funny and full of energy...
PROMOTER: Excellent...
JON: Or sometimes he just sits in the corner of a green room, rocking backwards and forwards whilst sobbing uncontrollably.
PROMOTER: There's a call on the other line...

I have my condition under control, with medicine and positive thinking. The fact that I have my dream job of course helps - but that doesn't mean that I'm not prone to bad days. I am. Today was one, for no real reason. Let me talk you through it.

9am: Got up. Ate chocolate weetabix - a cereal guaranteed to get you off to a bad start as there is clearly NO FUCKING CHOCOLATE IN IT.
9.15am: Tire of the day. Have a massive wee and go back to sleep.
1pm: Wake up. Check emails. Send some texts. Go back to sleep.
5pm: Wake up. Remember I need my prescription. Get dressed, collect it, visit my parents, feel vaguely human, come home.
9pm: Start writing this. Goal: Do something productive with my day.

I've got a tattoo on my arm of a power switch. I had this done to symbolise that I never switch off - fuck it, I'll take a gig in Azerbaijan at the drop of a hat if I have to. Even if it's a Mirth Control one and I have to drive people back to London afterwards.

(Non comedians: Just trust me, that last bit is funny. Do what my mum does and laugh, pretending you get it. Thanks)

Of course, the power switch does also say, apparently, that I'm permanently turned on. That's regrettable. Thank fuck it's funny.

Point is that I don't like having days off. If I sit at home I have time to think and worry and panic and fret. That's all I've done today. I've worried about all of the following:

1: My weight
2: My appearance
3: Money, or rather my lack of it
4: Edinburgh
5: My career
6: My daughter
7: My lack of friends
8: My teeth
9: The environment
10: The crack in my car windscreen
11: My fines at Blockbuster
12: Bills
13: Whether I've had too much sleep
14: If my neighbours might try to kill me
15: The economy
16: What to eat
17: My heart
18: My liver
19: Whether my penis is too brown (it is freakishly brown)
20: My website
21: Whether I worry too much

When I got to number 21, I started the list again in a different order. That is what the inside of my brain looks like, a constant ticker whirring by listing everything in the world that I can worry about. If I'm having a bad day like today, I can't convince myself to do anything other than worry. I can't even play videogames to distract me, because I worry that I'm playing too many videogames.

The way out of this is of course to face my worries and do something about them. If I don't like my body, I could go out for a run. If I'm worried about money I could put a load of my stuff on eBay. If I'm worried about my car windscreen I could call Autoglass as I'm led to believe that they are able to both repair and replace.

I don't do any of those things though. I sit and mope and can't drag myself out of the gloomy pit that I've made. I don't like being this way, I just can't get out of it on a bad day.

I may have been addicted to a lot of things, and they've all done me a lot of harm. I do have an addiction still though - an addiction to being onstage. If I didn't have comedy I don't know what I'd do.

It's interesting that I NEVER have a bad day if I'm working. No matter how bad the gig is, I'd rather be doing that than sitting at home on my own. I spend most normal days writing to get better at what I do - god knows I've got a long way to go yet. I may spend a lot of time sitting on the M1 or M6 but at least that means that I'm on my way to a gig. 20, 200 or 2,000 people - it doesn't matter. I have the greatest job in the world and it's ironic that making a few people happy makes me more happy on the inside than they'll ever know.

There's no real point to this little rant, no punchline at the end, nothing that I want it to achieve other than pull me out the funk that I've been in all day today.

Just bear in mind next time you see me onstage that if I make you giggle even in the tiniest way that you're helping keep me on the straight and narrow. If you look at my daft tattoos and grin then that makes me happy.

For every day I have like today, stupid little brainache day, I have a dozen great days. I see the world, I meet great people, I ignore my stupid brain and have a blast entertaining as many people as I can. You'll note that I didn't worry today at all today about having a purpose in life. As silly and frivolous as mine is, if I am forced to be a jester for the rest of my life than I'll die a happy man.

I know it's surprising. Who'd have thought that a man who listens to loud music, has a ton of tattoos and wears a lot of black t-shirts could be such a fucking emo?

If you take anything away from this posting, take this: If you ever see me away from my comfort zone of being in a comedy club and I'm moping, quiet and miserable: Slap me around the head with a large fish and remind me that I'm one lucky fucker who, most of the time, adores life and everyone in it.

No punchline, as I said. So I'll give you a sentence and you write your own joke around it. I'm off to try and enjoy chocolate weetabix again.

Here goes:

It turned out it was swarfega!

http://twitter.com/jimsmallman

32: Saturday Night Out

Tonight, as I walked back to my car after performing in Birmingham, some youth chose to punch me in the face. I was more stunned than hurt - his clumsy pugilism merely vaguely bruised my forehead so I doubt that the cowardly fuck will be troubling the highest echelons of boxing at any point soon.

I have no idea why he decided to attempt to give me a pasting. He walked out of a bar across the road from where I was working, strode up to me, said nothing and lamped me. It did lead to a very awkward moment where he expected me to go down and I just stared at him and said "ouch". He then considered hitting me again, panicked and buggered off. A very odd moment in my life.

This happened just off Broad Street, a place that pretty much resembles my idea of hell on earth. Hundreds of drunken revellers being as pissed as it is possible to be without sleeping on a bench every night, all trying to have loud conversations with people over booming R'n'B music in the vain hope that they can possibly go home and have awkward sex.

This is, of course, a Saturday night out.

I've been working at the same venue for the last couple of nights and I was astonished upon leaving last night just how short girls dresses are. I must stress - I was shocked. Not "pleasantly surprised". Genuinely shocked. Where do they get these dresses from? Hang on.

(Goes to look)

Ah, Lipsy.

Anyway, I should be pleased about this as a heterosexual man. Women wearing less should be a cause for celebration, surely? No. It just reminds me that I'm getting old and that I've got a seven year old daughter who'll probably be out and about doing the same thing in about ten years. Maybe that's why that dude punched me - he must be a parent of a girl and the sight of so much flesh panicked him. Poor little guy.

I've noted that on these Saturday nights out that there are three distinct groups that form pretty much all of the so-called revellers in bars and clubs.

ONE: ALL GIRLS TOGETHER

Masses of girls together, usually wearing as little as possible. At least one will be crying, one will hate all of the others and half will not be wearing their heels by 11pm.

TWO: THE BOYZ

A load of lads hanging out together, spending a lot of time proving they can drink more than the others and staring at the uncovered backsides of the girls that are out and about. From my experience this weekend they seem to all look EXACTLY the same: Very short hair, polo shirt, shit tribal tattoo. Hey, fellers? Just because your polo shirt is from Lyle and Scott it doesn't mean that you've managed to escape your social class.

THREE: COUPLES

Jesus, these are the worst. A group of four or more couples, where all the women are friends (NEVER the men) and the guys are forced to sit next to each other and pretend to like the others. They like to remind you that they're all attached and happy and that they don't NEED to be out on a Saturday night, but they choose to be because if they stayed at home watching television they'd worry that they were missing something. Nope. If you stayed in when you were single you didn't miss anything, you miss even less when you're attached and merely spend a fortune trying to relive your youth which you only see through the rose-tinted spectacles of booze and drugs back in the day.

Of course, I say all of this whilst hiding a guilty secret.

Yes.

I have never enjoyed a Saturday night out.

When I say "never enjoyed" I don't mean that I've been on hundreds of nights out and they've all sucked. I mean that I don't think I've ever had a Saturday night out. Not with dancing and fun and conversation and the sort of epic adventures that drinkers and revellers enjoy. The kind of weekends that prompted Pete Tong to tell us all that they started on Thursday and have idiots text into Radio 1 talking about how they were going to "large it". Cunts.

I digress. My point is that I quit drinking aged 20. Prior to that I'd never liked clubs and bars. I now work in comedy clubs every Saturday night. I still don't drink, have precious little time to socialise and after gigs people seem more scared of me than wanting to hang out.

Anyway, if you're reading this you're probably thinking that you've had loads of great Saturday nights out. I will not deny this. I will merely remain annoyed and jealous about it. Trouble is, I don't think I can fix my aversion to Saturday nights out now. As:

a) I'm likely to be working every Saturday night until the end of time and convincing people that Monday is my Saturday doesn't really work.
b) I'm nearly 33 for fucks sake. That train has sailed.
c) Large groups of people are always suspicious of little me, drinking coke while they get hammered.

And most importantly of all:

d) It seems that I have a face that people like to smack.

http://twitter.com/jimsmallman

31: Not Being a Proper Boy

I am 32 years old, nearly 33. In my life I have watched football, been drunk, done drugs, touched ladies on their rude parts and generally been a bit of a tearaway from time to time. Yet my family don't treat my escapades as (formerly) youthful exuberance, the actions of a bit of a lad in the prime of his life, oh no. They react in a different way.

My mother simply refuses to believe that I've ever done anything untoward, as she's my mum and she likes to presume that the sun shines out of my posterior. When I told her that I used to be an alcoholic she merely shook her head and went "naah, not my boy" and made me another cup of tea with too many sugars in it (and with a plate of assorted biscuits on the side).

My father accepted the alcoholism confession with a much more direct answer:

ME: Hey dad, I used to drink a lot.
DAD: When?
ME: I my teens, mainly. Like, all the time.
DAD: Ah, explains a lot. I just thought you were a twat.

However, on the few occasions that I've dared tell jokes about my surreal and downright wrong sex life he has stared at me with a look of "yeah, right", rolled his eyes and carried on. No matter what confessions I tell my parents (and my sister) they just seem to wash over them now. And having thought about this recently, I know why my fanciful stories of regret and wrongness are so difficult for my family to swallow.

You see, as a child I was never a proper boy.

I don't mean that I didn't have the required bits or anything like that, it's just that I was a RUBBISH boy. I'm still useless now, and I think it's too late for me to become a proper one.

Let me stress what I mean: This has nothing to do with sexuality or manliness, it's to do with those things that make you a boy or a bit of a lad when you grow up. I was never the sort of child to have scraped knees and muddy clothes (indeed my mother reminds me that I even hated finger painting at school because it got my hands dirty). Let me give you my life history:

Age 0: Born by caesarean section because it was too much physical effort to be born via conventional means and I wanted the extra attention. As I'm whisked away in foil my Dad sees me before my Mother and presumes that I'm a baked potato. Apparently I was emo even before birth and tried to hang myself with my umbilical cord. The Smiths were not even formed at this point.

Age 3: My sister is born. I surreptitiously eye her toys.

Age 5: Start school. First day is dictated by the few moments that I stop crying for long enough to be able to read a book quietly in the corner. One memorable day someone tells me that the toilets in our school are haunted, so I eventually wet myself. That day I was wearing bright yellow trousers. This was not the choice of my mother, but rather mine - and a foolish choice in which to disguise urinary mishaps (but a good colour to stand out from the crowd, it would seem).

Age 6: Discover something called "football" after watching Dundee United play Gothenberg on TV. Turns out that most children wanted to play the sport rather than watch it. I tried for a while but was so bad at it that in the end I would sit at the side of the pitch and provide commentary whilst eating my dairylea sandwiches.

Age 7: Have a massive tantrum when I'm not allowed to wear my favourite bottle green cords to school. Later in the year, parents decide to buy me my first football shirt so I can be like the other lads. Instead of choosing England, Leicester or even Liverpool, I choose West Ham because "their kit is the nicest colour".

Age 8: Too frightened to learn to ride a bike, I spend most of my nights after school running after my friends on their BMXs. I become very good at running, but still look like a pissed giraffe when doing so. I eventually get bought a bike (with no stabilizers) and regrettably have to learn. I fall off one day and cry so much that I'm sick all over my teddy bears (George, Nim and Little Gordon).

Age 9: First swimming lesson. Fall into the swimming pool and nearly drown. Upon being rescued I sob uncontrollably until the teachers give up hope and just read me the last rites and offer me a noose to end it all as soon as possible. Once the crying ends I realise that my skin is ablaze (not literally) and that I'm allergic to chlorine. My 7 year old daughter can swim now and constantly mocks me for this and my dedication to drowning the very second I come into contact with her paddling pool.

Age 11: Move school. Our new school field has trees in that we have expressly forbidden to climb. I stick to this rule, and when mocked for never climbing said tree I run and tell some teachers. Result: I am saved from climbing the tree, which I would not be able to do as a fully grown adult, let alone as a stick thin non-adventurous child. Also, all the other kids are banned from climbing the tree. I receive special attention from the teachers for this, and coincidentally also receive a different type of special attention from the kids too.

Age 12: Discover the Smiths. Uh-oh.

Age 13: Quite like girls. The standard way of showing this amongst my chums is as follows:

1: Pull hair of said girl.
2: Hit said girl.
3: Run off.
4: Repeat until they give you a kiss reeking of marmite and pickled onion monster munch.

My method is slightly different.

1: Admire girl from afar.
2: Send her anonymous notes quoting Smiths lyrics.
3: Realise she knows you sent the notes.
4: Ask parents if you can change schools.

Age 14: Discover booze. Not in the usual way, behind a skip in a park, pretending to be wankered on half a sip of Diamond White. Oh no. Much better to get drunk in my room listening to Morrissey, Nirvana and Joy Division and then really nail home this image of teenage angst by playing Turrican on the Commodore Amiga.

Age 15: First touch the lady bits of a girl. Slightly repulsed by it and have nightmares about losing my hand in an octopus for the next month.

Age 17: Sleep with a girl. Did not lose my virginity in the way most lads do (at a party, pissed) but instead lose it by candlelight to a girl 4 years older than me (who looks 4 years younger than me) whilst drunk on wine and listening to a mixtape that I made her. And one point she paused coitus to stop the tape (midway through a song from the Cure) and put on a Mary J Blige CD. I could not reach orgasm.

Age 18: Experiment with drugs. Not with my friends, sat around in a circle giggling at nothing at all whilst high on weed, oh no. But take large amounts of LSD in order to (and I actually wrote this phrase in my diary) "unlock my deeper consciousness" and be able to write more "heartfelt, yearning and personal stories". Jesus.

Age 20: Quit drinking and drugs just at the point when I should be being sociable at university and doing these things.

Age 25: After being married and divorced, briefly date a lapdancer hoping it will earn me some man-points. It doesn't: I find myself far too eager to give advice on what music she should dance to and find myself terrified that she'll one die run off with Peter Stringfellow.

Age 27: Start doing comedy. Not because I think I'm funny, but because I want to be less shy. Least rock and roll reason to fall into a career EVER.

Age 30: Start getting properly tattooed. My Dad lives in hope that one day I'll have a bit of tribal or the City badge etched into my skin. He rolls his eyes at Princess Peach et al and just lets me get on with it.

I had a conversation with my daughter the other week where she told me what the boys at her school were like (noisy, dirty, smelly and very active) and she - without even blinking - looked at me and said "but I know you weren't like that at school, Daddy". How did she know? I had to ask her. She shrugged and said "I just know. You're a proper Daddy but not a proper boy".

Enraged by this (but not showing it) I decided to take her to a chilly adventure playground and leap about the climbing frames with her. She dashed all around, demonstrating monkey-like agility all over the place while I gamely tried to keep up (I made it look like I was letting her win, I wasn't). Eventually I tripped and fell, hurting my ankle. I made Amelia come and sit next to me on a swing while I tried to not scream in agony. As we sat there swinging, Amelia soon got bored and stood up. She patted me on the shoulder and said the following:

"You just sit there Daddy. The swings are much more your thing."

So I did. Damn her little perceptive mind.

http://twitter.com/jimsmallman