Just enjoy it. I’ve been telling myself that this week.

That’s probably easier said than done if this week’s Curse of Comedy is anything to go by. This week it was Hancock and Joan, the doomed relationship between Tony Hancock and Joan Le Mesurier.

It didn’t show any of the good times. Bang, it started with Hancock in rehab, his first meeting with Joan and it was downhill from there.

“You called my mother a c…” says Joan as Hancock is back in hospital. “I can’t even bring myself to say it.”

She smiles.

“You also called Kent the same thing.”

Hancock smiles. “I called Kent a cunt?”

They laugh, or seem to. In fact Hancock is crying.

I wanted to say to him, ‘Just enjoy it’. He had that tremendous success. But it was never enough, or the right kind of success. So in lieu of being able to tell Hancock (being dead, a messy suicide in Sydney) I’ve been telling myself.

‘Just enjoy it.’

It’s easy to forget because we always want more. But I’m going to enjoy it. Three months and a bit now to Me and Mickie James coming out. I have a good publisher. The person who read it at Dazed and Confused loved it. I’m going to be on the radio. I have a launch and other events.

It’s brilliant.

But then you read something like ‘Then We Came to the End’ and you think, ‘I want to be as brilliant as that. Now, that is brilliant!’
I loved it. It’s about office life. It’s narrated by ‘we’.

“We were fractious and overpaid. Our morning lacked promise.”

The characters drift in and out of each other’s offices. Stories are started by one and then continued by another, they start out with the mundane. “I’ve been to McDonalds” but turn into something else, a colleague whose child has been abducted and murdered mourning in the McDonald’s PlayStation.

“No a PlayStation is something else.”

“What?”

“A PlayStation. It’s a games console.”

“You’re missing the point.”

This colleague is sitting in the balls, just looking at them day after day. Or someone else being left a totem pole in a will, someone stealing someone else’s medication, someone dying of cancer. All their dreams - writing a novel, a film, quoting Emerson, Thoreau, not thinking about life.

“There are two things you can’t advertise. Fat people and death.”

But while they are scooting around the office, swapping chairs in fear (that’s a long story), life is ongoing.

And if I could write something like that then I would be happy.

I would, I’d be happy. I’d be happy with that.

I’d be happy.

Currently listening to - The Whip, X Marks Destination

Currently reading - Bad Traffic, Simon Lewis

Clip from The Rebel