Men Understand Women
‘Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.’
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Clara has started a director’s course at a small and notoriously twattish drama school in North London. We see each other twice during the beginning of my third year at Robinson and the rest is a grim stutter of awkward phone chats. We’re both lousy on the phone and it doesn’t help that she hates her course and is utterly miserable. Hers is the kind of hardcore little school that seeks to break down student inhibitions by getting them to wear masks and then violently attack each other. The place is run by over-mighty teachers who’ve had no one to challenge them since 1968: baby-boom dickwads manipulating go-for-it young people and not an audience in sight. The only thing these particular drama students are going to learn is how to be a drama teacher. Or how not to be one.
I won’t pretend this is my first experience of having an unhappy girlfriend, but this time I actually care. I just about grasp that the sentence ‘I wish you would cheer the fuck up’ would be counterproductive, but beyond that I have literally no idea what I’m supposed to do. Never mind: she’s coming to see me in a show soon. I’ll do some funny dancing. Girls love my funny dancing.
But I know something is seriously wrong. As we’ve seen, when times are difficult I usually take it out on my girlfriend. Now that my girlfriend is difficult, I take it out on Footlights. I’m now vice-president. The new president is a man called Charlie who is a brilliantly funny writer, but I’m the only writer/performer who has been on tour. Charlie has the title, but to all intents and purposes I’m the goddam star around here.
It is not good for me. It wouldn’t make me happy even if things were great with Clara. As things are, I’m at the height, the zenith, the very snow-capped peak of my own arrogant, insecure, minty dreadfulness. Enjoy!
The show in which I expect to do the funny dancing is the Footlights Pantomime that I’m writing with Charlie: Dick Wittington.
I inform the director that I’ll be playing Dick. Tim Shawl, a Maths third-year, slightly struggles with this and suggests that, traditionally, the principal boy in a pantomime is played by a girl.
I explain that this won’t be happening.
Tim also wonders when he might get to see Act One of the script because time is already running short. I tell him, with the obnoxious courtesy of someone who knows he holds all the cards, that this stuff isn’t always easy but Charlie and I are doing our very best and the script will certainly be ready when it’s ready.
Generally, Charlie is a bad influence and I love it. He has a Withnailish quality, by which I mean he is outwardly clever, posh, rude, very funny and often drunk. What goes on beneath the surface is infinitely more gentle, but not many people will get to see that. Later that year I’ll write a sketch called ‘He’s Just Shy’ about the world’s most appallingly rude bastard at a party whose friend keeps saying, ‘He’s just very shy and vulnerable.’ You would have to be a saint, or more accurately a clinical psychologist, to see the vulnerability driving mine and Charlie’s behaviour that term.
His college have given him a whole flat on the edge of town. I turn up with handwritten scenes and he laughs like a maniac. Some scenes we write together. We sit at his Mac and he touch-types at a speed I find dazzling. There will be an endless supply of coffee and cigarettes till about 3 p.m., followed by an endless supply of cigarettes and red wine. We do a lot of laughing, partly about the script, but equally about how late the script is and how we’re probably pissing everyone off.
We sweep into production meetings in our long coats, late and emotional, making tosspot pronouncements and generally amusing some people and making others want to stab us.
But there probably should have come a moment when we noticed we were doing nothing more heroic than flying by the seat of other people’s pants: the lighting designer with his head in his hands; the musical director frowning his way through a half-written script with no page numbers; the way Tim Shawl can no longer talk without moving his arms like he’s being attacked by invisible bees . . . I probably should have turned to Charlie and whispered, ‘Are we the baddies?’
Which reminds me . . .
*
I kept hearing this first-year’s name and it was annoying me. I knew he had something, but people wouldn’t shut up. I was going to have to see for myself.
We’ve hopped back to my second year. I’m in a little performance venue called The Playroom to watch a one-hour non-Footlights revue called Go to Work on an Egg. A bunch of mates from Peterhouse and Jesus College have cobbled it together, apparently. Eddie had put me in charge of Smokers and I’ve auditioned most of them. They’re fine but let’s not get carried away.
Except for one. As a first-year, he was never going to be in the Tour Show, but he’d been asked to contribute material and I’d written a sketch with him. The sketch was nothing special, but that wasn’t unusual. It’s just that we’d nearly made each other sick with laughter while writing it. That was both special and unusual.
He’s on stage as the lights come up. Come on then, young David Mitchell. Let’s see what you’ve got.
Oh, I see. You’ve got everything. I spend the hour enjoying the sketches without once taking my eyes off David. He’s very funny, which helps. But I’ve seen other funny student performers. This is different. He’s completely committed, but entirely natural. He can afford to seem generous to the other performers because he’s going to get your attention just by standing still. It’s a precious combination of ease and focus that I conceitedly think reminds me of me. He looks like he lives there.
It’s an exciting but also worrying turn of events. What am I going to do about this?
In my head, I hear a version of a conversation I know off by heart from The Empire Strikes Back.
Emperor: There is a great disturbance in the funny.
Vader: I have felt it, my master.
Emperor: We have a new enemy: David Mitchell.
Vader: He’s just a boy.
Emperor: He could destroy us. The son of . . . er, whoever his dad is must not get on the Footlights Committee.
(Pause)
Vader: If he could be turned, he would be a powerful ally.
Emperor: (Thinks) Yes . . . yes! He would be a great asset. Can it be done?
Vader: He will do a two-man late-show at the ADC Theatre with me next year . . . or die, my master.
At the end of my second year, at the Edinburgh Fringe, I’m doing the Tour Show and David’s in a patchy play, written by Charlie, called Colin!
I pop the question. I don’t quite say, ‘Join me, and together we can rule Footlights galaxy as . . . two blokes’, but I do suggest we do a show. He’s a polite young man from a minor public school, as well as a first-year being asked out on a big comedy date by next year’s vice-president. So I can’t help hoping he’ll look pleased. What he actually looks like is Charlie Bucket just after Willy Wonka offers him a Chocolate Factory.
*
In Dick Wittington, David plays Andrew the Cat – a fastidious cat who is also a recovering heroin addict. I’m Dick, of course, a fantastically rich and spoilt child who yearns to leave his privileged background and go to London to work in local government. He and Andrew team up with Mr Miyagi, who is played by Matthew Holness (the brilliant future Garth Marenghi). The inclusion of Mr Miyagi is due mainly to Charlie’s joyful obsession with Pat Morita’s performance in The Karate Kid: at various stages in the show, Mr Miyagi defeats his enemies by doing karate on them very slowly.
Matt has a reasonable concern about playing a character of East Asian heritage and I try to tell him that the Californian Pat Morita is no more from Okinawa than Matt is. He doesn’t really buy that, so then I say that it’s a parody of a Hollywood take on Japanese people and he should probably relax. He does not relax. Finally I tell him it’s fine because in a later scene which maybe he hasn’t had a chance to read yet (this is a fair bet because I’m making it up as I speak), Mr Miyagi will become the victim of racist banter from a Northern club comic played by Tristram Hunt. Therefore we won’t care that we’ve got a white person playing the fictional version of the fictional Mr Miyagi because the joke will be about racism and not about funny foreigners.
Matt doesn’t really believe a word he’s hearing, but goes along with it. He appreciates that I’m making an effort, probably because he’s heard I can be a bit difficult. A bit minty.
He’s right.
First, a brief word about cunts. This word for the female genital arrangement is one which some people find unusually challenging for political reasons rather than the usual ones to do with good taste. Or rather, so the reasoning goes, the c-word is unusually powerful because the culture finds vaginas unusually distasteful. Therefore its use is misogynistic and a feminist no-no.
I have some sympathy for this view, and the one and only time I got to work with Rik Mayall he gave me an affectionate telling-off for ignoring it. I used the word in reference to the channel controller who had cancelled Bottom. Rik, one of the 1980s pioneers of non-sexist comedy, corrected his idle student. ‘No no, darling! Cunts are lovely! Cunts are wonderful things! She wasn’t a cunt. She was a spoonful of the Devil’s cum!’
While I agree with my late hero that vaginas themselves are indeed lovely, I’ve never quite been able to ban myself from using the word altogether, provided I’m in the company of other men and women who use it all the time. Within my peer group (which inevitably includes a lot of actors), the usage is almost playful and has come to imply a fairly specific kind of arrogance and narcissism. Anyway, Caitlin Moran, Germaine Greer and my wife all say it’s OK and that’s good enough for me.
So. There’s an old adage which actors repeat to themselves whenever they start a new job. ‘Have a look at the people around you and, after the first week, if you can’t tell who the cunt is – it’s probably you.’
Rehearsing Dick Wittington, I don’t even bother looking around. I already know. It’s like I’m on a mission. It’s like I’m starring in the movie Mission: Cunt.
I’m keen for everyone to know that, in the words of Sammy Davis Jr, I ‘ain’t the boy next door’. Unfortunately, the way I mean to make this point is by a) acting better than everyone else, and b) acting like a cunt.
It will be some time before I realise that in acting, as in many jobs, a) you get better results when you collaborate instead of compete, and b) given the choice, only cunts prefer to compete.
The script is hopelessly late and far too long. In rehearsal, the increasingly frantic Tim Shawl reads out a long list of cuts that are necessary to make the show the length of a pantomime as opposed to the length of a Ring Cycle. Everyone else has their script out, crossing out the excised lines. Since I’ve given myself title role, a presence in nearly every scene, a five-minute monologue and a couple of songs, these cuts are probably going to affect me, so I should probably also have a script and a pencil at the ready.
Instead, I just sit in the middle of the room in my ’94 Summer Tour T-shirt (no one else has one of these, so this is a risible assertion of seniority) and pout at the ceiling. When we get to rehearsing, I start doing my lines, including the ones that have just been cut. The director and the other actors say, ‘Actually, that’s just been cut.’ And then I frown at the script and say, ‘Oh, has that been cut? I liked that bit. Why would you cut that?’ while staring at Tim with disingenuous confusion. Essentially, for the whole rehearsal process of that show, I give an uninterrupted masterclass in minty cuntiness. Or possibly cunty mintiness.
I still thought that Talent was more important than Practice and did so without noticing that I was using my Talent as a suit of armour rather than as something to be put at the service of a team. I didn’t even notice that acting was a team sport. Why would I? I hate sport. And teams. I was the best – other people needed to deal with it.
Inappropriate competitiveness is not an exclusively male trait and neither is swaggering around like a bell-end. But we seem to have made both behaviours sufficiently our own that a woman behaving with equivalent awfulness will have her ‘femininity’ called into question. There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting to win if what you’re involved in is an actual competition. A game of darts, for example, is a competition. But acting doesn’t have to be like that and neither does a lot of other work. On the desolate occasions I’ve found myself watching The Apprentice, it’s notable that these people are not competing to be the best businessperson, but the biggest wanker. The interaction between the men and women – sorry, that should be ‘the boys’ and ‘the girls’ – is especially surreal. Given that masculinity adds up to little more than the pursuit of not being a woman (not walking like this, not talking like that), it’s bizarre to watch ‘the girls’ acting out a version of it in order to compete. You have to pretend to be someone who is furiously insisting that they are not you. Women entering this arena are the ghosts at the circle jerk. All the most harmful and self-harming aspects of masculinity are busily performed: the need to dominate others, the weaselly interest in hierarchy, the confusion between cruelty and strength, an impatience with nuance and the moronic idea that inflexibility is a virtue.
We’re not talking about women trying to be men. We’re talking about women and men trying to be arseholes. Because that’s what they think you’re supposed to be like at work. There’s a lot of it about.
Into this, Clara arrives at Robinson and gives me a hug at the door just a bit too long and just a bit too tight. Upstairs, she tells me that she’s had a fling with a lighting technician called Tony (‘Tony the Techie’ I call him with the deathless wit of a jilted boyfriend). Clara also says that she doesn’t understand how she could be ending our relationship when ‘we don’t really have a relationship’.
I’ve heard this one before – the classic ‘How could I have just thrown your lovely pudding in the bin when there is no lovely pudding?’ gambit. But I don’t get angry, not yet. I just tell her that this means I’m going back into counselling. I expect that she must understand that she has made this necessary. I’m glad that she’s coming to see the show tonight but, naturally, she has made it very difficult for me to do my important job.
She takes it right on the chin. If I were her, I’d get straight back on the train to London. But she’s old-school. She says, ‘Well, I don’t have a counsellor so I’m just going to hang around weeping in bookshops until the show. Hope you’re in the bar afterwards, though.’
It’s a two-week run and that night is the first Saturday. It’s not my place to say that I’m very good in it, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that I massively rock. At the end, as I leave the stage and walk past the rest of the cast in the wings, they hear me say over the din of the applause, ‘It’s not ENOUGH.’ Dame Fauntleroy is highly displeased.
Clara has been to the bookshop. It’s 1994 so she’s bought another novel where the main characters can suddenly levitate. She’s complimentary about the show, but obviously it doesn’t change a damn thing. I should have got on the train more often. We’ve blown it.
Back at the room, she says, ‘Now then, am I sleeping on the floor, or in that cupboard? Or whereabouts, exactly?’
I say, ‘You can sleep with me if you like. I promise to keep my pants on.’
She says, ‘Oh, shush.’
In the morning, after a really wonderful night of no sleep and no sex, I make to get up but first say, ‘Tell me this isn’t the last time I get out of a bed that’s got you in it.’
‘This isn’t the last time you get out of bed that’s got me in it.’
It is, of course. And then she’s gone.
So I do the thing that sensitive young men like me (whose sensitivity is entirely focused on themselves) do when they find themselves inconvenienced by a woman. They don’t shout or lose their temper. Good gracious, no. That’s what Dad would do.
No, they just write her a nine-page letter which describes in forensic detail why she’s out of her mind. And this is done in the genuine belief that once the girlfriend understands that she is ‘just confused’, ‘dishonest’, ‘suffering from some weird kind of amnesia’ and ‘completely wrong’, why then, she will gratefully fall back into the arms of this gentle prince and relationship bliss will resume.
Clara receives the letter and stops returning my calls.
I go into a miserable sulk of self-loathing. Because that’s another thing a sensitive young man would do. Rather than, say, apologise.
*
There again, once a sensitive young man belatedly understands that he’s been dumped, it’s only natural for him to start sensitively sleeping around. A whole eight days later, the panto cast party sees me trying to charm all the people I’ve variously ignored, patronised or insulted over the previous few weeks. One of them is a very nice girl called Jenna. She beckons me over . . .
‘Now, Rob, the thing is . . .’
‘I know. D’you live nearby?’
‘Yes.’
‘Get your coat.’
We run giggling out of the bar, snog in the middle of the street, and then run, giggle and snog all the way to her house. I’ll draw a veil at this point, but something must have gone right because we went out with each other for the next eight years.
What I could really do with at this point is someone who isn’t going to dump me and isn’t going to die. Jenna does an excellent job of both and, as luck would have it, she’s also funny and gorgeous. Still, I don’t make it easy for her, at least not in the beginning. Little Lord Rebound is going to make her feel romantically short-changed and, as far as lovingly expressed sentiments go, she will wait for some time for an improvement on ‘get your coat’. She doesn’t see me gazing at her across the room the way Colin Firth gazes at Jennifer Ehle in Pride and Prejudice, and it will be a good four months into the relationship before she suggests I might want to take down the A4 show poster featuring Clara’s face from my bedroom wall.
‘When’s it going to get romantic!!?’ is the half-joking catchphrase. We spend our first St Valentine’s evening making up the silly cast biographies for the programme of the Spring Revue. Fun, but not romantic. If we go to a restaurant, we split the bill. Fair, but not romantic. One of the happiest days we spend together is in a London park when we find out she is not, despite a catastrophic condom malfunction, pregnant. A massive relief, but definitely not romantic.
I love her. And I love the way my name has changed into ‘Rob and Jenna’. But it never quite gets romantic, not the way it’s supposed to. This is where the diary fizzles out because I’m too happy to bother with it any more. But somehow I already know that if I say that to Jenna, presenting it as a massive compliment, she’s going to be distinctly unimpressed. ‘Hey! You’ve single-handedly turned me from a suicidally lonely and miserable bastard into a complacently content bastard! That’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it?’ Actually, it is a hell of a thing. But it’s also not Colin Firth with a bunch of flowers and two tickets for the Orient Express.
She’s aware of her own conditioning and it pisses her off. She knows she’s been sold a dummy about being swept off her feet by Mr Darcy and is annoyed with herself for slightly wanting it anyway.
Thank God I’ve never been one of those blokes who steers his partner around in public with a hand on the small of her back. I mean, what the hell are they doing? Would it be better if she wore a dress with an actual handle?
But there’s definitely something uxorious and protective in my manner towards Jenna. I’ve gone from preening one-man show to affable husband without having to go through the whole bloody Romeo thing again. It’s like I’ve suddenly noticed how Romeo ends up and I don’t like the look of it.
One night, that protectiveness I mentioned pops up in a fairly dramatic way. The venue for this everyday story of sexual harassment and ham-fisted melodrama is, appropriately enough, the bar of the Amateur Dramatic Club Theatre.
It’s our last year at Cambridge, and towards the end Jenna is playing Mistress Quickly in a May Week production of Henry IV Part One. The poster features her showing a bit of barmaid cleavage, which is fine by her.
However, one night in the bar, a student called Terrance Keble starts making posh, insulting noises about whether Jenna’s breasts have been digitally enhanced. He’s leader of the student Conservative Association, which doesn’t exactly endear him to me, and having started a huge row he walks across the room to rip the poster down, the better to compare Jenna’s breasts to those on the poster. He then, for some demented reason of his own, picks up Jenna’s bag and starts rifling through her stuff.
I impress upon him, at some volume and not a little perturbation, that these are the actions of ‘a fucking cocksucker’ and suggest to him with equal warmth that he should return the bag, which he then does. Everyone, including Jenna and about ten angry friends, give him a brief but robust outline of what they find lacking in his moral character. The poster goes back on the wall and things calm down for a while.
But then, just as he’s leaving, Keble gives a visibly upset Jenna what I can only describe as a leer, and opens his mouth to say something guaranteed to be insufferable.
That’s when I try to hit him.
You’ve always got more choice than you think. From this one and only experience of actually attacking someone, I can report that, although the clichés about red mist and blind rage have some truth to them, I also know that I definitely didn’t have to do it.
I did it anyway – or at least tried to – and I won’t forget the look of astonishment on Keble’s pink face as Dick Wittington came at him with a clenched fist and a look of murder. My friend Jack instantly put himself in the way, which was lucky for Keble’s face and my puny wrists. Jack’s a big chap and I didn’t get within two yards of Mr Tittystare. Instead he was bundled out of the fire escape by the bar manager and did some shouting about how I ‘had a fucking problem’ and I shouted back that, no indeed, on the contrary, it was he who ‘had a fucking problem’.
This Ciceronian exchange concluded, Jack put me down and Jenna tried to cheer me up by saying I probably shouldn’t have done that, but she was secretly quite pleased that I did.
And I really did need cheering up. Because what was the point of it all if it turns out I’m just this normal bloke? I didn’t need to be at Cambridge to get pissed up on a Saturday night and lamp a Tory. I could have done that at Coningsby Community Centre.
But the real problem was that this was my low opinion of ‘normal blokes’. I thought normal blokes were violent as well as sexist. For three years I’d surrounded myself with men who, like me, had never been in a fight in their lives, and who were also doing their best to see women as part of a universal whole of humanity rather than some quirky subset.
Despite that, I still insisted I was different. I still had to be the leading Anti-Dad.
It was perfectly clear to me that if I’d decked Terrance Keble and we’d both ended up in Casualty, and if Dr Jizzcake had found that a sufficient cause to send me down in disgrace, my explanation to Dad would have quietly delighted him. He’d have been sorry for me too, of course, but also delighted. His interpretation wouldn’t have been that I got into a fight in defence of an anti-chauvinist principle. It would be that I got into a fight because I didn’t like the way another bloke was looking at my girlfriend’s tits.
And he’d have been dead right. That’s what bothered me.
*
As Finals approach, I start to think about the exam questions that I’d actually be able to answer. I’m hoping for something like:
1. Describe, as loosely as possible, what happens in the first two pages of Moby-Dick.
2. Is it called Prince Lear or King Lear? Feel free to draw a picture if that’s easier.
3. What would be an ideal way to stage the play Arse-bandits in the Round? You won’t be marked down for spelling mistakes, but in case you’re unsure, it’s ‘proscenium’. Although the answer ‘do it in a theatre with a proscenium arch’ is the wrong answer.
Jenna has somehow got a telly and VCR in her room and she, Jack and I spend a lot of time there working very hard for the Tragedy paper we’re all taking by watching videos of Macbeth, Iphigenia in Aulis, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.
The three of us are also in an unthinkably-close-to-exams production of Bedroom Farce, along with David and a few others. And I also do the two-man show with David. Oh yes, and I’m in the Footlights Tour Show again. It’s almost as if I’m in denial. I’m pretty sure I’m handling this exam pressure brilliantly by pretending to feel no such thing.
My body, on the other hand, knows otherwise – which is probably why, one day as I get up from my desk, the floor leaps up and smacks me in the side of the head. My heart is beating itself stupid and the silence is roaring in my ears like a Vulcan bomber landing in my brain. I crawl over to the bed and lie still, wondering if I’m about to die. After a few seconds of careful breathing, everything returns to normal. Later that day, Jack tells me that this experience has a name: a ‘panic attack’. Oh, right, that’s what that means then. I thought it was just a colourful way of saying you’re a bit stressed out. Well, if it appears that I’m more worried than I thought I was about being hopelessly unprepared then the solution is obvious. I go to Jenna’s and we watch The Princess Bride.
My exam strategy, if you can call it that, turns out to be waiting until I’ve got an exam tomorrow morning, going to the library to find a collection of essays on the relevant period, trying to memorise about four of them overnight, and then going to the exam. At that point, I find the questions with the least total irrelevance to the essays in my head and write a sleazy opening paragraph explaining why the two things actually fit together quite nicely. I then spew out the pre-written essay, being careful not to include any of the better or more memorable phrases so the outrageous thievery doesn’t stick out any more than it needs to. After all, for all I know, the repurposed essays will be marked by one of the academics who wrote them.
Yes, it occurs to me that this is a wretched business and an appalling waste. The panic attack was probably inspired as much by guilt as by anxiety. But I suppose I’m at least consistent. I didn’t come here to get an excellent degree. I came here to meet someone like David Mitchell. As it turned out, I met the actual David Mitchell, which was even better.
*
I wander slowly down Burrell’s Walk on the way to the Senate House, where my results will be posted up on a noticeboard. I’m telling myself not to worry. The eleven-plus mattered, A levels mattered. This won’t matter.
Still, I have some memory of academic pride (at least with English) and as I look at the board and see that I’m leaving university with a 2:2, I feel a wave of disappointment. It’s an outrageous reaction, given what I failed to do. But there we are. The feeling is: ‘I used to be good at this stuff and now I’m an official mediocrity.’ It takes all of three seconds for this nonsense to be replaced by profound relief and gratitude. I deserved to fail altogether. This is so jammy they should make me Lord Fluky of Jam, the Bonne Maman Professeur of Spreadable Berries at Robertson’s College, Strawbridge.
Mark, Andrew and Dad come to the graduation. The families in the Senate House are specifically asked not to take photographs during the ceremony, which means that Dad, Mark and Andrew all wait until I’ve seen them before dicking about with cameras, pretending they are about to take a picture. Sometimes I really like men, especially these men.
There’s some milling around on the lawn outside and Dad has gone unusually quiet for a moment while I chat along with Mark and Andy. His eyes are quite red and he hasn’t even had a drink.
Presently he says to me, ‘I know you’d rather your mum was here, son, but for what it’s worth I’m very proud of you.’ He looks like he feels lucky to be invited. He’s taking up someone else’s place.
That’s when I forgive him. Right there. At least, that’s what I believe in that moment.
I mumble, ‘Nah, y’all right, mate. I’m glad you came.’
I’m leaving home. I left years ago but now it’s official. I don’t pretend to my family any more that I want to work ‘in computers’. They’ve gradually absorbed the information that I seriously intend to share a flat in London and try to earn a living as a comedy actor and writer.
I’m growing up in circles. One circle opened when I was thirteen and began with the idea ‘I want to be funny on TV like in Home Sweet Home’. That circle, on my graduation day in 1995, is still moving along, looking for its beginning. A sub-circle circle, ‘I get to be funny on TV by going to Robinson College’, is just closing.
29-09-90
Happy 18th Birthday Mr Robert Webb. No, of course I don’t feel any different – I can’t believe the world now considers me an adult. It probably doesn’t if it’s got any sense! My party at the Community last Friday was fucking ACE. Everyone came – I mean just the whole country practically.
I picked my Cambridge college – Robinson. They want AAB so I better bloody well pull my socks up.
I’ve been letting things get me down too often about Mum and should just try to cultivate a sense of inevitable good news. I should start just thinking and walking around like I know that Robinson will let me in and I know all the rest to come: making a big splash in Footlights, finding some funny people to work with, Edinburgh Festival, Radio 4, Channel 4, BBC 2, plays, novels, Hollywood . . . I mean it’s all ludicrous but why not? Ambition is free – this is no time to put limits on it. I’m going to be bigger than John Cleese.
It was a good plan. I’m not knocking the plan. And yes, I do know it looks freakish. ‘And so, I shall simply write down my life on the back of a postcard and then sort of . . . do it.’ Well, most of it. I suspect John Cleese is quite safe from my bigness.
The trouble is, it’s not a ‘life’, is it? It’s a job. A person as young as that can’t be expected to know the difference between what he wants and what he needs. This one reckons that if you get the job right, the life will follow. It’s not an uncommon view.
If I said that heavily defining yourself by your work might not be a very good idea, then you might react like an American friend of mine. ‘Worry less about the office . . . that sounds sensible,’ Matt said. ‘Although I have to say,’ he continued, ‘I’ve had some pretty cool days at the office.’
I’ve had some pretty cool days at the office too. I just thought they were cool for the wrong reasons.
Let’s go to the office. I’m fairly sure I can find it . . .