Professionally in my non creative side, which I'm quite creative with in my own way, I can just about force the little each day approach, or indeed a lot each day. In general though, I'm the boom or bust sort. Either I'm in the zone or I'm not.

I've a lot to get a handle on in the next week or so. Some decisions to make, some events to prepare for... Much to do!

I couldn't muster the inspiration. I've used my trick of making it happen to me by attack of the diary. This works to a point, but it doesn't quite turn on the tap.

Then, this evening, as time was running out, ideas started coming to me. Silly nuggets of stuff, edits, fresh takes on things. Even a shopping list of old things to revisit...

It's a bit like the radio was turned on and I could hear the music coming from it.

It's nice when your thought processes kick in.

Perhaps I had made it happen too. Yesterday I went swimming to find inspiration. I found water and cool water at that. I also found aching muscles that had been hiding, dormant. Novelty breeds novelty, I guess.

If I were a better writer, I'd know how to end thi....

If you're in a situation where:

• You have to beg to get the slightest of things done
• Your contribution is undervalued
• Efforts around you go into things of arguably less importance/urgency than your work
• The default answer to your any suggestion is no
• You feel like you're doing all the work
• When you go the extra mile to reach out to the others, they act as normal

Then get out of that situation.

It's a case of change your circumstances or change your circumstances. Maybe you can make things better, or maybe making things better means giving up.

On balance, a recent decision I made to stop doing a project has proved to be the perfect outcome for me.

I would rather make a joke at the detriment of getting respect or trust, than stay silent or say the obvious.

I would rather fill the air with blether than sit bored with the usual run of the mill talk.

I talk in emotive terms and exaggerate to make myself understood.

This is not an illness, it's just a way of thinking that I seem to have cultivated. The down side is that I'm a bit of a dick. The up side is that I really try to hold the community of people I work with together with a fun way of expressing ourselves. When it works it's fun. I realise that a few people who are accustomed to presenting their ideas to me will have some adjusting to do when they come to work with others.

The downside is when I can't get the message across. When the communication style is not working, when the common language isn't there, when I can't get what I expect... Then I'm useless.

That's the next frontier. Either learn to appeal more broadly, or accept a broader range of contributions from other, or filter whom I work with more carefully.

Right now, everything's working just fine.

This is opinion, and what does my opinion count for, eh?

I've not enjoyed a lot of things about the last two weeks. I took to the stage tonight with some difficult decisions on my mind. (Note: to anyone worried about my wellbeing, these decisions are not life changing or especially important.) I didn't have a plan, but you don't when you are MCing.

Tonight I was funny. Laughter happened, I made it. No idea how... Not entirely sure what I said. Nobody will care by tomorrow morning.

That's ok. Standup is my thing for me. I do it because it's part of what I do. I'm me because it is a part of what I do.

My daughter gets it. She knows that Daddy has a job where he goes out to make people laugh, and that is called a gig. It's simple for her. She thinks I probably wobble my face and blow raspberries to do it, but you can't know everything at just three.

I like what I do.

The central delight for me in standup is this. You have a thought and it makes someone laugh. The time from having the thought to getting the laugh is the potency of the delight. The shorter the time, the better.

Improvising some Brexit jokes without an agenda was fun tonight. Riffing on audience comments was lovely. I really should get out more!

An Army Of Crawlers

Here's an example of a recent comment on a recent WordPress article (yes, I do both WordPress and Blogger).


Now. It turns out that this is just a robot. I call it the sycophantic robot, since it seems to come along to many of my posts, say something lovely, yet vapid, and have no apparent agenda. I don't know what it's trying to do. Perhaps:

• See whether its posts hit the site right away, and if so, then post adverts for viagra
• See whether it can get generic praise to be approved and then, subsequently, edit the post to advertise viagra
• See whether it can strike up a friendship with me and sell me viagra directly
• See whether it can improve hits on some other site for some odd reason

RoboBabe

I've been helping some non-comedians make stand-up sets recently. Here are some random notes that came up. They are probably good advice to anyone doing a stand-up set:

A couple of weeks back, I got a notification via Facebook that there was a reply to a comment I'd made on someone's post. When I went to read that reply, I didn't have the right to see the post. It turned out that I also didn't have the right to see the comedian in question's profile anymore. BLOCKED! Wow!

This is not a big deal. It's really not important to be connected with every comedian under the sun, whether we've gigged together or not. I can't say that the individual is someone I particularly like or respect; I'd been finding him intolerably brash on Facebook, and he probably felt it, even though I kept my comments fairly jovial, and I'm glad not to be reading of his constant dick-swinging any more.

It's interesting, though. It turns out that some folks, who see themselves as deeply righteous and good people, cannot take a tiny bit of gentle piss-taking without their egos exploding. In the case of certain individuals, I kind of get that. I known one comedian who is so out there and outspoken, that the majority of things she reads about herself are from embittered anti-feminists or anti-atheists attacking her because it helps them deal with their own inadequacy. In this case, though, a white alpha-male sort, I would have expected a little more capability to take some light ribbing.

I'll not name the comedian, except to say he's an Australian with a grand sense of self.

The two episodes which provoked me to poke a tiny pin in his bubble were thus.

He'd done a show somewhere and someone came up to him after the show and told him an insensitive, racist joke. The right way to deal with this, in my opinion, is either to ignore it, or to say "that sucks" and then move on. According to this person's own post, he gave the fellow a 40 minute tirade, worthy of the closing act on an outrageous bill, tearing so many strips off him, that he would have won a medal in strip tearing offing.

My comment to this post:

"You're no shrinking violet"

I thought that was rather amusing, given the brash dickish behaviour this guy was boasting of.

Latterly he posted about how he was sick of being taken advantage off and that he felt the more he did for people the less he was respected for it. This from someone who dealt with a pay dispute with a club by bitching about it on Facebook, rather than negotiating pay terms with the club directly - a club who are trying to negotiate. I won't say the club's in the right or wrong, but perhaps someone who uses Facebook to air their contractual stuff is hardly a meek hard-done-to trying-to-please-everyone type.

My comment:

"You're like a modern day Jesus"

His response was something like

"Go suck my dick you fucktard"

My response

"Sorry, you're not Jesus. You're much too sweary"

It's really childish banter. It got me blocked.

I hope it's amusing to read about. It sort of still tickles me. Especially since other social media platforms are trying to get us to connect. I can't connect with him - he'll only see it as an attack on his huge, yet fragile, ego.

If you can guess who this bellend is, please get in touch. Ten points to anyone else who can take more piss out of him. I suspect he's actually a bully who justifies his behaviour because he claims to uphold socially just viewpoints.

... They're great until you try to do something off the beaten track with them. I wanted to use a cheap bit of sound cue software. I wanted it to appear in the new side panel, but you can't do that with many apps. I wanted to get the sounds onto it from my Dropbox: I can play those sounds on the iPad, so surely I can save them in its memory and get them to be importable by the sound cue software? Not on your nelly.

iOS seems to sandbox every application so you can't really share files between them. There may be workarounds, but they involve using the computer to move things between apps using the godawful iTunes software. This is basically retarded. Computer file systems have been around since the 60s... Why can't my iPad have one? 

On my android phone, a free equivalent piece of software was able to do the job in no time, having access to the random download folder that my files happen to have wandered into. Easy!

I digress before I've started, though. I guess these sorts of minor trials and tribulations are the theme of today, but this particular challenge was resolved on Friday.

Today's news is that I'm home having performed at my second Leicester comedy festival. The first was 2009's with mine and Hannah's show the Seven Deadly Jokes. Today I was at the same venue, which was really different to how I remember it. I don't think it has moved, I just thing I remember it wrong.

Putting this show together has been the wake up call my set and material needed, but it has been at a significant cost to my stress and sanity levels. And those of those around me.

Last night I did two run throughs of the final edited script. I was going to perform with notes on the stage, but those notes were more of a diagram of the order of the material with a few clues about its internal contents, which I didn't need to look at in the end, since writing the map basically committed a lot of the detail to memory.

Doing two hour long performances back to back is quite exhausting, especially with a tech setup before and after. Given I've been running on fumes anyway, this was even more draining. However, I was able to get through the show without mishap both times and got a good recording down, which I could use for passive rehearsal - i.e. listening to it back and giving myself notes.

This morning went wrong. My daughter's swimming lesson was threatened by the fact that I realised I had left the house without a swim nappy for her. I should have turned back. I realise that now. I took the double or quits strategy of trying to get one at the other end. I went to three shops, with my little girl running round after me like a micro challenge Anneka, and eventually got her the appropriate swim protection. She then had a third of a swimming lesson before it was time to get back out, so late were we running. Some might have aborted the whole mission, but she was so committed to the swim nappy search, and I was telling her about how to cope with a problem, which is either ignore it, live with it, or fix it... Basically we'd decided to fix the problem, so we were committed.

A quick lunch at home and it was time for me to go to Leicester. This resulted in:

Watching 2 shows before mine. Very good.

Doing my show... Hmmm...

Getting the student radio crew who had come to interview me to help me back to the car... Clever!

Doing the interview... Me blethering long answers to familiar questions.

Going off to watch my favourite Fringe act do a greatest hits show... I would have laughed harder, but was too tired and sore.

Not a bad score for a nearly 42 year old on a Sunday afternoon and evening. The comedy festival even tried to banjax things by taking tickets off sale the evening before the show... This somewhat invalidated the two for one offer they then promoted today. Despite this some people came and some of them even laughed.

I will watch the video later on. For now, I can say that I did a new show. I don't know what I think of it, but it went better than the swimming, and worked well with sound cues courtesy of Android.

The iPad's invite was revoked. It was replaced by a side of A5.

To be honest, though, this has been a really weird process. In an ideal world, I'd be working this hard over more months at an average rate, rather than having to sort it out at the last minute on an essay crisis style deadline. I know the creative process often works this way, but it has been a total baptism of fire at each point where I have moved the show forward.

In January I did new material nights and tried out bits and bobs that I'd half written with the show in mind. So few tryout nights meant I had to extrapolate what the end result ought to be, and I Hadley.e room to cut things. I also snuck some newer bits into sets and MCing gigs... Which worked...

The big question for me was how much of this stuff would end up in the final show and how it would be sandwiched between older material and linking sentences to turn the whole think into a single piece.

Today I ran through various versions of the show a few times. I found I learned it best by not learning it or having the script in front of me. I just fathomed it out. New songs, new bits... New all sorts.

I think my last cuts have brought it down to a 50 minute running time, but I can't be sure. It ran an hour in my last run through. Too long...

I have had a weird day. Equipment and techniques I've not used since before my children were born have been my sole focus. I have spontaneously invented bits and made script decisions, because there is no time to think twice. It has been exhausting but fulfilling...

... And I have a rotten cold and am over tired.

This will be an odd weekend.

Leicester Comedy Festival: 6pm, Sunday 7th Feb 2016. Who Wrote This Shit?

I did.

In a hurry.