Here, Read This

The title of this blog “Here, Read This” is not just a cunning advertising ploy on my part to grab the attention of passing internet traffic… although if it did I’m glad you’re here. “Here, read this” is what my friend said to me last week when he gave me a book to read. It is one of his favourite books and a book that I am now obligated to read.

It’s a theme of my blogs that I have to clarify my point and make sure you know that I’m not a complete dick, so allow me to acknowledge the following points:

• Loaning me a book was a very nice thing to do. He thought about me, about my tastes and felt that I would really enjoy reading this book
• This is his book, his property, so to hand it over to me and to trust me with its well being was also a nice thing to do

So can we agree that I’m not oblivious to the realities of friendship and that I am aware of the positives that are glaringly obvious from this exchange? I felt it was necessary to include the above disclaimer because the statement that follows kind of makes me sound like a bit of a dick.

My friend gave me a book to read. What an arsehole!!

Now I’m under pressure to read the book. I don’t deal well with pressure. I’m a ridiculously slow reader. Even if I gave it my all, the absolute earliest I would have this book read by is Easter next year?

I’ve been reading Don Quixote for the last 14 months and that’s not an exaggeration for comic effect. Obviously I haven’t been reading it constantly for all of that time. I’m about 3 quarters of the way through it and I have half read another book in that time. I also stopped reading it completely for 5 months when I went travelling through China, Vietnam and across Australia. My point is I don’t have a lot of focus when I read.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading, I do. Reading is fantastic. I absolutely adore the English language. I am a professional wordsmith (that is, without a doubt, the wankiest way I’ve ever described myself). I’m a comedian and I make a living from my ability to turn a phrase. It’s an ability I have because of the fantastic literature that I have read. However, I have the attention span of…

When I lived in London I would take the tube everywhere, and I always had my book in my bag, so whenever I sat down on the tube I would pull out my book and read. It was a fantastic way to enjoy a book and to pass the time of an otherwise dull journey. The only downside is that I got out of the habit of reading at home. I got out of the habit of making time to read a book. Now I walk everywhere in Sydney. So I don’t have an opportunity to read on trains or buses and I haven’t had the discipline to make any other time to read.

I do read a lot though, I read loads of blogs and articles. I read them when I should be working on the computer, I can also read them on my phone while I’m waiting to meet a friend. They’re convenient and it means I take in a lot of different points of view on a lot of different subjects. But a book is a commitment that I am out of the habit of making. A while ago I realised this and recently I started reading when I go to bed. Just for 15 minutes a night but it’s amazing how quickly I’ve started to look forward to it. Telling my friend about this that inspired the loaning of the stupid book in the first place. Me and my big mouth, always getting me into trouble.

So now I’m faced with a dilemma. Do I finish the other books first or do I drop them and read my friends’ book first? If I finish the other books first it may be some time before he gets his book back, but if I don’t continue with the books I have on the go I may never finish them.

I haven’t even started to examine the pressure that I’m under to like this book. This is what always bugs me about when someone lends me a book. Eventually I’ve got to give it back and when I give it back he’ll ask me what I thought of it. When he gave me the book he told me that it’s one of his favourite books, that he loves it and that I’m guaranteed to think it’s amazing. I would hope you would think I would like a book if you lend it to me: for me a book is at least a 6 month commitment so I can’t waste time with books that you aren’t certain I’ll like. But don’t make a big thing about it because that just puts the burden on me to love it as much as you do. I can’t guarantee I’m going to ‘love it’. I’ll do my best, promise.

This is one of my longer blogs and I could have spent this time reading that stupid book. But I didn’t, I wrote this blog so you could read it instead of reading a book yourself. You’re welcome and I hope you enjoyed it. Books are great but blogs and articles are so much more convenient. If you suggest to a friend that they should read a blog, it’s easy to read and you don’t have to physically give them the blog. You don’t hold it over them and put them under immense pressure to finish it in a reasonable time. There is no guilt-trip to love it just as much as you. It’s just a blog, email them the link and see if they enjoy it. If they do, they can read the next one. If they don’t, they haven’t wasted the best part of a year reading something that sucks.

This wasn’t just a subtle hint for you to tell your friends about my blog. But if you want to, I’m not going to stop you. Tell the people you like about it. If you don’t like someone, loan them a really long book. Then, a week later, ask them if they’ve finished it yet.

I Bought Some Weights

I was caught in an ethical dilemma. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a gym and I was kind of missing it. However I wrote a blog about not going to the gym and I made a valid point that not going to the gym was actually good for my comedy career. But you should never discount just how narcissistic I am. On the other hand once I’ve made a decision I stick with it.

My stubbornness to stick by a decision long after I can remember any valid reason for making it is a trait that has some history. A good example occurred a little while ago when a friend asked me why I hate another comedian. Hate is a strong but appropriate word and I hate this man. He is Lex Luther to my lycra body suit with a cape. Yet, when asked why I hated him I couldn’t for the life of me remember the reason. I have hated him for so long now that it’s second nature. All I know is that I must have had a good reason when I started hating him so I continue to hate him almost out of loyalty to my previous decision. I’m the same with my refusal to own a wheelie suitcase. I know they make perfect sense and they’re so much easier but I simply refuse to own one, I’ve always refused to own one and I’ll be carrying my luggage on my shoulder until the day I die.

My point is that joining a gym was out of the question. Even if I hadn’t written a blog on why I won’t go to a gym, I also found out that gyms cost a lot of money in Australia and I’m one for avoiding spending money at every opportunity. But like I so perfectly said before, you should never discount just how narcissistic I am. So I decided to compromise and I bought a set of weights. 2 dumbbell bars, a long bar and 50kg of weights. They came as a set and they cost about 2 months gym membership. So I figured it saves me money in the long run and it saves me the time of going to and from the gym, time I can then use writing. There is no downside… almost.

I bought them from a sports store about five minutes away from my flat. Five minutes is officially not a journey that you are allowed to take a car to, even I know that, so I walked. I paid for the weight set, the nice boy who works in the shop helped me carry them down the stairs at the front of the shop. This is when I quickly realised that I was in trouble: I now had to walk home with 50kg of weights and a 183cm bar. This is the first purchase I’ve ever made that I should have spent several months training for.

The weight set came in a case that had wheels on the bottom of it. It was kind of like a wheelie suitcase, which I hate, but far enough away from the design of a wheelie suitcase for me to be able to use the wheels and keep my principles. There was no way I was going to get it home without the wheels so I had to suck it up and use the wheels anyway.

The case was much shorter than would have been ideal so I had to lean awkwardly to the side to drag it along the footpath, up and down the curb, across the road and then up a hill. All the time holding this almost 2 metre metal bar aloft, like a beacon alerting all around me to my poorly conceived purchase.

In hindsight, a suit was not the most appropriate attire to attempt this journey in. It was a warmish night and here’s a workout tip for you – a leather jacket doesn’t ‘breathe’ when you start to sweat. But I got it home anyway. I made it into the apartment building, up the lift and into the flat. I then had to pull all of the weights out of the case and carry them in several more manageable journeys up the stairs to the bedroom. All except for one particularly stubborn 1.25kg weight that I had to literally crowbar out of the case. I am ashamed to say that I only resorted to using the crowbar after I broke a nail trying to pry it out (clearly I’m not ashamed enough to avoid mentioning it here).

As far as using the weights goes, I fully intend to. Just not yet. After that workout my whole body aches and I hurt my back dragging them home. If only I hadn’t written a blog about not going to see a physiotherapist.

NOTW

What have I taken from this News of the World scandal? Everyone has an opinion on it and the bandwagon is pretty full of people who are disgusted by it. Maybe I have a little bandwagon-fatigue on this story but I’m not quite as outraged as everyone else seems to be this week. That may be because, in my opinion, this has been a huge story for years now. Thanks to everyone for finally agreeing with me.

The fact that NOTW hacked the phones of people has been on record for a long time. Two people have served and completed prison sentences already. But no one seemed to care about this story when it was ‘only’ the royals, the famous and the politicians getting their phones hacked.

Why is that? Why has it only been since the families of victims of crimes had their phones hacked has it become such an issue? For example, John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Member of Parliament is reported to have been a victim of the NOTW. If a foreign government had been found to have hacked the Deputy Prime Minister’s phone (or even just highly suspected of it) this would be considered a serious act of espionage. Is it because we see him on the television that we don’t consider him to be an actual person?

That’s my conclusion from watching the storm of opinion on this. When the NOTW was hacking the phones of celebrities it didn’t matter because the general public doesn’t consider them to be real people. It was only when victims families, or ‘real people’, had their phones hacked that this became something that the general public cared about. I’m disgusted by the suggestion that the NOTW hacked the voice mail of families of 9/11 fire fighters and of child murder victims. But let’s not lose sight of all of the other victims in this story.

Another example, Gordon Brown may have had his phone hacked, so what, he was just the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the man who was guiding a G8 economy. He went on to be Prime Minister of Britain, was the phone hacking going on while he was in charge of a country? Should charges of treason start being talked about? The audacity to hack an elected leaders phone makes all of us victims and when our basic democracy is at stake, I’m paying attention.

I was appalled that the police refused to tell people who may have had their phones hacked and disgusted beyond belief that they refused to investigate this criminal activity. Their reasons, as far as I’ve heard, for not investigating it are a joke. It concerns me that the Met police considered it to be unworthy of their time. In today’s world, information is worth more than gold and the police force needs to take the theft of it seriously. But I was appalled and disgusted years ago!!!

Why don’t we consider people who are on the TV to be ‘real people’? This really concerns me. I may not like all of Hugh Grant’s films (although I have to declare a fondness for Notting Hill) but he’s a real person. He has the right to privacy too. The media has conditioned us to treat celebrities as commodities. Doing so makes it easier for us to justify trawling through their intimate details in the gossip section of the paper. Let’s be honest, we all read them and then deny doing so. Sure celebrities use the media to their advantage too and maybe there is a little schadenfruede in them being the victim of a beast that they feed but the fact remains, NOTW was a beast that everyone encouraged.

The celebrities wanted to be in the paper so that they could sell their products and then complain about how they’re always in the paper. Are all celebrities good people? Probably not, but since I haven’t met them all I’m not going to pass judgement.

Be honest, you wanted to know what (or who) that football player was doing when he wasn’t playing football and you only wanted to know so you could berate him for not being a role model. We love to watch people fail and the higher up the perceived food chain they are the more enjoyable it is watching their fall. But that doesn’t make us good people.

But when we realised that the NOTW was also trawling through the intimate details of the victims of some of the worst crimes of our lifetimes we couldn’t deal with that. We haven’t been conditioned to treat them as a commodity. We treated them as human beings, with real feelings, who were victimised by a news organization simply for being victims. We, as a society, reacted in the right way and demanded justice. My gripe isn’t with the publics’ reaction to these revelations, but with the publics’ failure to react in a similar way when it was Sienna Miller’s phone messages.

People only bought the NOTW because it was full of juicy gossip that no other paper had. Now you get to be angry with them because they did naughty things to get the information that you wanted. If people hadn’t encouraged the NOTW then maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe we could have stopped them a long time ago by being outraged when it was ‘only’ the famous people who were the victims

Physiotherapy

Physiotherapy is a valid practice. There, so don’t sue me; I don’t want to get into the whole Simon Singh lawsuit territory. So for the record I’m not saying that physiotherapy is hogwash or lacking in any scientific merit… I will say that for me, currently, I just can’t see the point of going to see a physiotherapist.

Yesterday I went for a jog before work. I didn’t go for any grand purpose; I simply thought it would be a good way to start the day. I just downloaded a heap of teach-yourself-French podcasts and since they’re about 20 minutes long I thought it would be nice to go for a 20 minute run and listen to one of them. Anyway, on my run I seem to have pulled my calf muscle. Not badly but it’s a bit sore and I’ve got a slight limp because of it.

Someone I work with suggested that I should go to ‘the physio’. When I asked why, he said that they would give it a good massage and with a bit of rest it’d be better again in a week. Thing is that I’m sure it’ll be fine in a week if I just rest it, no need for the physio. Sure, it would probably heal slightly faster if I went to the physio, but really, what’s the point?

I’m not a professional athlete. I’m a comedian. I walk 5 feet from the back-stage to the microphone and then I pretty much stand still for 20 minutes. Physio’s cost money and being nimble is simply not a necessity for me. Sure I can’t go running for a week, but running is actually quite hard and sitting on the sofa listening to my podcasts is much much easier.

Here in Australia being sporty and active is seen almost as an obligation. Given that Australia is now the second most obese country on the planet it’s obviously not a binding obligation. But, by the people who aren’t clinically chubbified, doing sport is something you’ve got to do and do regularly. Hence physiotherapy has blossomed in Australia.

I was speaking with a physio from Belgium a few months ago (we were having a chat while drinking beer in a completely non-physio way) and she said that physiotherapists in Australia are the highest paid in the world. That’s not a verified fact and I was quite drunk at the time, but the way physiotherapists are talked about in conversation amongst the sporty people I know you’d think they were deities in some unholy Nike religion.

Everyone ‘has’ a physio and people are always willing to recommend a good physio to those heathens, such as myself, who don’t ‘have’ a physio of their own. It’s like Scientology and Amway rolled into one – for every loser you sucker in you get to move up the pyramid to an injury free paradise.

Well Australia, I’m not joining your cult. I hurt my leg and I’m fine with it. Sure I won’t be able to go for a run for a week and I’ll just have to deal with that. I’m going to take the money I would have spent on physiotherapy and I’m going to go to my church – the pub.

Moving

Over the past year we have moved a lot. We sold our place in London and moved to the other side of London. Then we sent all of our belongings to the other side of the world and travelled through China for 3 months. Then we landed in Perth, put our stuff in a car and drove to the other side of Australia. That was all stressful. But I don’t remember any of it being as annoying as last weekend when we moved 3 blocks across Sydney.

When we moved across London we hired 2 Polish men with a truck, and some very questionable personal hygiene habits, to move our belongings. When we moved across the world we just put our stuff in boxes and someone came to pick it up. When we moved last weekend we did it all ourselves. I have never wanted 2 Polish men with questionable hygiene habits more than I did last weekend.

I say that we did it ourselves; my cousin helped. He was a lifesaver because there was no way we could have done it without him. Helping you move is the type of thing that you can only ask family to help with. A good friend will help you bury a body but when you need to move house they’re nowhere to be seen.

We really needed my cousin’s help too. Before you read the next sentence I want to make it clear how much I love my wife, she is amazing and I’m a better person because of her. But she is marginally stronger than an 11-year-old schoolgirl, which isn’t overly helpful when it comes to moving a fridge. So I needed my cousin’s help with the big things.

When you’re looking around the place you’re moving out of it all seems so simple. A couple of car trips and it’ll be done. You convince yourself that since you got it all in there it’ll be easy to get it all out. What you forget is that you got it all in there over the course of several months or years and you bought a new item of furniture to fill a need on average about once a month. But when you’re moving out you have to move it all in a weekend and that’s a whole new level of stupid.

We got it done and it’s all in. We hired a van for the big things and my cousin worked his butt off to help us. He’s not drinking alcohol for the month of July so I couldn’t even take him for a beer to say thank you. Instead I bought him a box of chocolates which is the type of gift you give to someone when you realise you only ever buy people booze these days and you’ve forgotten what the other acceptable forms of gifts are.

For those of you who are going to be moving house in the near future I have some words of advice for you – pay someone else to do it for you!! I know you think you can do it yourself and question if it’s worth the extra money to pay people to do it for you… it is, trust me.

If you ignore the above advice and still want to do it yourself then, in no particular order, here is a list of helpful tips for moving house:

• Bend from the knees – if you hurt yourself on the first trip you’ll have to hire someone else anyway.
• Buy furniture with wheels – it’s probably a bit late for this now that you’ve already decided to move but our fridge is missing a wheel and believe me when I say that I really missed that wheel.
• Try to avoid an argument with your partner early in the day – you will eventually have an argument but if you have it early then the rest of the day is awkward.
• Be realistic in your assessment of how much you can carry – it may take an extra trip and it may hurt your ego but if you drop the television because you were trying to balance it on the sofa you’ll regret it more than a little bruising of the ego.
• If your partner asks you to pose while you’re holding the washing machine so they can take a photo of you then you are allowed to start the inevitable argument early – recording moments with a camera is never a welcome distraction when you’re trying to lift something twice as heavy as you can possibly manage.
• Move embarrassing items before your relative comes around to help you – sure you may like to wear the superman outfit during sex but even the most gullible relation will eventually become suspicious when they find it in the draw with the wrist restraints.

Next time you’re thinking of moving you should make a list of all of the reasons for moving. Take your time composing this list and make it as exhaustive as possible. Then think very carefully about how heavy all of your stuff is and I bet you’ll conclude that staying put is probably the best option after all.

I’ll tell you more about our new place in the coming weeks…

Moving Home

We’re moving next week and I’m nervous. Yesterday my wife and I are signed a 12 month lease for a flat that she hasn’t seen. I’ve seen it before; it’s a great flat that has everything we were looking for in a flat, but my wife couldn’t go and see it when it was open for inspection. I made it, by myself, to the 15-minute window that it was open for. I told her about it and showed her some pictures I took on my mobile phone. So she has decided to take my word on it and trust me.

It’s the ‘trust me’ part that’s making me nervous. I’m not sure I trust me to make the right decision on where we should live for the next year. Why the hell is she trusting me? It’s not that I’ve made bad choices in the past. Sure we previously lived in a flat below a mad man and that was primarily my fault but apart from that one time and the flat that we moved to because I liked it (even though it didn’t have central heating and was in London in the winter) I think I’ve made good choices. Sure those 2 flats do account for roughly 6 of the 8 years we’ve been together but let’s not get bogged down with statistics.

So yesterday we signed the lease. I had a few sleepless nights wondering if I noticed everything that I was supposed to notice when I walked around the flat during the inspection but now I’m fine. She’s going to trust me and I’m just going to have to deal with the consequences if I’m wrong. They say that you only regret the things you don’t do. That’s bullshit; it’s entirely possible to regret the shitty flat that you’re stuck in because you signed a 12 month lease without checking with your wife first.

What you have to understand is that I saw it at the end of a very stressful day. I had seen 7 other flats in the 3 hours before I saw this place. She had seen them with me but for the last flat she went to one and I went to the other because they were open at the same time. I know it sounds like I’m making excuses for something that might be okay, but I don’t have a history of making decisions by myself. I don’t like to do it. I am the guy who looks at every shirt in the shop and then still asks the shop assistant to decide for me.

Decisions stress me out. Especially decisions that affect someone else. And even more so when that someone else is my wife. She isn’t someone who holds a grudge but you’d have to be a saint to live somewhere you hated for a year and not mention it at least once. Let’s hope I’m right.

Earlier I said that there was only a 15-minute window to see the flat. That’s how it is in Sydney. The estate agent will open a property for 15 minutes and everyone who wants to see the place has to all walk through together and step around each other to see it. It’s awful. Maybe I’ve grossly underestimated the value of a real estate agent’s time but surely they can spare a little longer than 15 minutes. Sure there are exceptions but if I was to tell you that an estate agent could only open the property for 15 minutes because they were doing volunteer work for orphans you’d be rightfully surprised.

For the record, that orphan line above probably took the longest amount of time to write out of all of the sentences I’ve written since starting to write a blog. It’s amazing how even the most mundane task still seems out of reach of an estate agent. I wanted the statement to be far fetched so I went with ‘volunteer work for orphans’ but if I’m being honest, ‘not stealing from a blind man’ still seems like a fairly noble task for an estate agent.

On a closing note: sorry I haven’t been writing this blog as regularly as I was before. It’s this whole moving thing, plus I’ve been a bit sick, plus I’m a lazy lazy man. I’ll be back to my weekly blog writing from now on…

Work Life Balance

Someone needs to figure this out because I just can’t see how it works. Everything that you want to do in Sydney costs a disproportionate amount of money. So in order to do anything you’ve got to have a job and preferably a well-paid job. But in order to keep this well-paid job you have to work so many hours that you don’t have the time to actually do the things you want to do.

I’m pretty lucky, I’ve got a relatively good job that pays okaynand I’m also fortunate enough to make a little extra money from stand up. This should enable me to have a pretty awesome time in Sydney. But it doesn’t actually work that way. Because, like so many others, I’m always so busy or tired from work that I don’t get to do the things I’d like to.

Toady I’m tired because I did get to do something I wanted to. Yesterday I went indoor rock climbing. Which is something that I haven’t done for about 18 months. However I maintain that I wouldn’t feel so physically wrecked from it if I had had more time to go rock climbing for the last 18 months.

This blog isn’t meant to be a complaint. By knowing what’s going on in the rest of the world I’m feeling really lucky to have a job. I’m currently enjoying stand up and the creative process more than I think I ever have before. So I am having a good time, I’m just not getting out very often.

So what happens when we’re stuck at work and can’t get out to do the fun things we’d rather be doing? Quite simply, we spend money on shit we shouldn’t feel we need. We have a long train commute to work so we spend a fortune on an iPad to entertain us while we sit on the train. We have to drive to work every day so we spend way more money on a car because we feel you should have a nice car since we spend so much time in it. Rushing into work for a meeting so you don’t have the time to make your lunch in the morning, no problem, you make good money so you’ll just buy your lunch every day.

Why do people need a massive TV? So they can have that cinema experience at home. Why do people want the cinema experience at home? Because they’re so tired when they come home from work that they don’t want to then go out again to go to the cinema. But if they worked less they wouldn’t be able to afford the over-priced cinema ticket anyway, they’d just sit at home with a small TV.

I’m not sure what the answer is. Maybe we don’t need all of these things. Maybe we should work less and enjoy the company of our friends and family more. Make sacrifices in our careers and devote some time to us. Would we really be any worse off?

I write this blog sitting in a room alone in between editing a sitcom script and working on some stand up that I didn’t have time to write out this week because I was so busy with work. I’m typing on my laptop while simultaneously charging my iPhone and eReader whilst also listening to music on my iPod through noise cancelling headphones. I don’t have all (or any) of the answers and I’m a great big hypocrite. It’s something to think about anyway.