It's Not Me, It's You

by Jon Richardson

  Where a childhood memory helps explain something of how I became the man I am today, it has been included, but this is not the tale of how a child from the cold wastelands of t’north of t’England worked his way up the ladder from being the guy in the kitchen who puts the little salads on the side of baguettes to fulfilling his dream of becoming a full-time stand-up comic. That is not a story I intend to write until I am sat at a scruffy old desk in a battered little potting shed somewhere in the Lake District with a dog curled up at my feet, confident that the most interesting parts of my life have been lived and any of the people I might upset or insult are not around any more. The year of publication of this book will be my twenty-eighth on the planet, so I do not consider for one second that I have had a bio worth graphing about, automatically or otherwise.

  Rather than being a chronological journey across my years, it is the tale of another journey – the most important journey on which I find myself – my quest for perfection. Perfection is what drives me in everything I do; be it finding the perfect partner, living the perfect day or simply constructing and consuming the perfect sandwich.

  When speaking of the perfect day, people tend to imagine one spectacular event, the beauty of which overshadows any minor shortcoming which might have occurred up to that point – walking along a beach at sunset, drinking red wine on a shagpile rug by the glowing embers of a fire in a French chateau or, for a lucky few, making love at dawn on the top of Mount Everest. As special as those individual events may be, that’s not what I’m talking about at all; that’s not how perfect days work in my book. The perfect day is not a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, it is something that can happen every day if you’re willing to put in the effort. A perfect day exists independently from the tasks that need to be completed on that day and concerns only how efficiently they have been carried out. It begins well before the perfect cup of tea, it starts the moment you open your eyes – or, for the real hardcore, the moment you finish your ‘To Do’ list the night before, rewriting if necessary to eliminate spelling mistakes and ensure even word spacing and neat handwriting. So fragile is it, that it can be undone by so little as a stubbed toe or an odd sock. A perfect day is one without mistakes and they are to be utterly cherished.

  I do not subscribe to the view that mistakes are a part of life; they are not. This is not to say that more cannot be learned from a mistake than anything else; that is true, but that is not an excuse for making them. Mistakes are caused, in the main, by a failure to plan properly, try hard enough or pay enough attention to detail. If you are willing to take personal responsibility for each failure, however small, then you can strive to eliminate errors altogether. I am of the belief that the ‘point of life’ is not a question, but a noun; an actual point-scoring system that rewards perfect execution of a task on a measurable scale:

  * Made someone smile? Gain two life points.

  * Made someone cry? Lose five life points.

  * Dropped a spoon? Lose one life point.

  * Cheated on your wife and children by sleeping with the ex-partner of an ex-teammate because you are a multi-millionaire Premier League footballer and you are arrogant enough to think you can get away with anything? Lose a million life points.

  And so on.

  It gives me satisfaction to think that not only is there such a thing as right and wrong in this world, but there is a way of measuring exactly how right and wrong something might be. People would like to think that the decisions we make in our lives are ephemeral and impossible to quantify but they aren’t really. Most of the things we do that will hurt other people are known to us before we carry them out, and rather than discover afterwards that there were hidden consequences to our actions, in truth we simply make a value judgement on whether or not what we stand to gain by upsetting someone else justifies the decision for ourselves.

  The ultimate goal of my point-scoring system is, of course, to allow someone to become the Ultimate Human on Earth. I do not believe in a god, but I would like to think somebody somewhere is keeping score for us. New players are constantly being added to the worldwide league, international transfers are being made each and every day, regardless of whether the window is open or closed and, as is always the case in life as well as sport, the up-and-coming talent seems to lack some of the grit and honesty of the generation that came before it.

  After each day’s play I go to bed at night, acutely aware of whether or not I won the day, took a battering away from home or whether the world and I ground out a well-fought draw. The commentator in my head goes on trotting out his clichés like sheep jumping over a fence to send me off to sleep, or keeping me awake if further match analysis is needed.

  Whatever the benefits of living my life this way – and I hope that as you read on you will discover that there are many – it is not an instant recipe for happiness. I am definitely guilty of spending so much of my time trying to do things in what I deem to be the correct manner that I can sometimes forget entirely to enjoy them. While some people may eat a biscuit in a certain idiosyncratic way for fun, I do it because I believe it to be the correct way of doing so and deviation constitutes failure. I don’t need to tell you which the best part of a Jaffa Cake or a Jammy Dodger is, do I? Why create another disappointing memory by leaving yourself with the worst bit at the end?

  It is a source of some frustration for me that Cadbury’s have been collecting data on the many ways people choose to eat their Creme Eggs for years now and yet stubbornly refuse to publish their results. We need to take public ownership of the company and force them to release their facts and figures so that we can find out once and for all what the correct answer is, for there must be one. What if I have been doing it wrong all this time?

  My weirdness aside, if I am to find any friends, particularly a girlfriend, she will almost certainly have to be a human. My previous track record tends to suggest that of all the species that exist on the planet, it has so far been exclusively humans to whom I find myself sexually attracted. This is a good thing legally if nothing else.

  The unfortunate coincidence is that humans are also top of my list of creatures I would most like to see wiped off the face of the planet. Sometimes cats are well placed just behind them, and wasps certainly never manage to get out of the danger zone, but neither of these last two can be reasoned with and so are equally worthy of my fear, but not so much of my hatred. I fear all that which cannot be talked out of causing harm – drunks and children also fall into this category.

  Most animals that do harm have not evolved a thought process capable of rationalising their actions or else they only act in self-defence. Humans, on the other hand, have conscious thought and therefore their malicious acts score double points. I do not subscribe to the view that we have been placed here by some kind of higher being; I do not believe we are special enough to warrant that kind of attention. We are simply a thing, that lives in a place, and one day something will happen to that place (either because of us or in spite of us, some kind of cosmic event beyond our comprehension let alone ability to influence) and we won’t be here any more. Our gods will go with us when we leave.

  If I might submit my entry here for the award for most turgid and illogical metaphor in literature: In the giant nightclub that is the universe, the clock will sooner or later reach ten-to-two and the bouncers of time will pick us up off the ground and fling us through the doors of existence onto the pavement of history, and we will be missed no more than a tapeworm is missed by its host.

  The world will move on regardless and then in millions of years something else will live here and perhaps it will dig us up from the ground and marvel at how small our brains were and try to piece together the story of how we moved and where we lived and how we died. But maybe they won’t. That’s what I believe anyway, but for a man who can barely get through the day without losing his temper at something so small as to be invisible to most people – as you will discover later – perhaps speculating on such spiritual matters is
a waste of time.

  Whatever the chain of events that has put us, in our current form, on this planet at this time, I feel far more privileged to exist when I consider the millions of years of evolution and cosmic shift that has made our lives possible than by the thought that we were manufactured, and our world made for us, by a man in the sky.

  Life created by a supreme being is but a toy, a plaything for levels of existence far beyond our own, but life that exists on a knife edge, life that is a gift from our many ancestors who braved their surroundings and adapted so that we might one day master them – that is a gift to be cherished.

  The person sat opposite you on the bus is not much more than a mayfly in the great scheme of things, given a brief window in the eternity of time to live and to love, to taste strawberries and to ride bicycles and experience cold sores and stomach upsets, to have baths that had too much cold water in them and to hate the taste of oysters and not understand poetry. There is so much for each of us to get done and so little time to do it in that we can’t possibly do it without help, so we should make space for one another, clear a path to allow those of us through who need a helping hand.

  A smile at a stranger on the bus can be all it takes to propel someone who is tired a little further onward on a grey day, or perhaps just start by moving your bag off that seat next to you so that the old lady can sit down?

  Oh you won’t? I see. Did you pay for two seats? No.

  You just like to have two seats to yourself? OK.

  But the evolution thing? They all worked so hard to get us here and you could just …?

  I see, you’ve had a bad day at work and you …? Right.

  Well then, fuck all mankind, may we all disappear in a great flash of light and let cats and dogs rule the planet for a while and see if they can behave any less ignorantly than we do – we with our evolved thinking and deep beliefs. People who see my shows have sometimes described my thoughts as a stream of consciousness, but I think a river of scorn would be more like it. I don’t mean to hate people, I get forced into it.

  As you can see it takes very little for the good man in me, the one who wants to care and to believe the best of people, to be suffocated. Let me witness the success of a moral person any day of the week over the success of a twat – show me an England football team filled with players who give their money to charity and congratulate their opponents and I will applaud their ten–nil defeat in a way I could never applaud a narrow one–nil victory by a bunch of greedy, philandering morons. Struggle to do something right and I will help you; profit in selfishness and I will hope you die. There’s the line, right there.

  ODD COMIC’S DEFINITION

  In talking about some of the things I obsess about and my routines for executing certain tasks, a certain level of compulsion will become apparent. While I may appear to display certain traits of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I am keen to point out from the outset that I do not refer to myself as a sufferer. I have never been given, nor sought, a medical diagnosis for my mental condition, but rather consider myself to be someone who has been allowed to develop certain habits, and beyond that has been able to exploit those habits for comedic effect. I do not seek to make light of an illness that can cripple lives and leave people unable to function in modern society and the over-simplistic treatment of OCD for comedy is a huge bugbear of mine.

  I know I have countless habits that serve no purpose but I am powerless to avoid them, and it is true that I am frequently frustrated by a number of things that I should let go of (currently the fact that the spine of the foreign DVD I have ordered has text running in the opposite direction to all the others on the shelf, making it impossible to file it neatly). But I am constantly annoyed when I hear jokes that portray all sufferers of OCD as nothing more than glove-wearing weirdos who cannot leave a room without switching the lights on and off three times. Anyone who regularly attends live stand-up comedy will know this as ‘The Rain Man Effect’, whereby a comparison to the famous Dustin Hoffman film role is enough to explain away any odd quirk of behaviour and elicit gales of laughter from a room full of drunks.

  Aside from my annoyance at the confusion of different conditions this represents, I believe compulsion, much like sexuality or preference for olives, is a question of sliding scale, where there are not simply sufferers or non-sufferers but degrees of suffering. There are those among us who are unable to stop washing their hands from one minute to the next and there are those who can go for weeks without washing their hands or wondering what makes up the rainbow of dirt underneath their fingernails, but there are far more people somewhere in the middle who wash their hands when appropriate and shudder slightly when they push the toilet door on exit and find that it is wet.

  Similarly, I do not claim to be a hypochondriac, but nor can I deny that I haven’t on occasion lain awake at night fretting that the red mark on my arm is a hideous tropical disease picked up from the unwashed grapes in my fruit salad rather than the truth, the result of a drunken fall. But as I am keen to stress, the compulsion is but a facet of my perfectionism, an attribute far more associated with Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder than OCD.

  To give you an idea, this is the kind of self-deluding perfectionist I am: Leeds United fans of the early 1990s will be familiar with the chant ‘There’s only one Gary Speed.’ This would seem to be a valid enough point, except for the fact that in my 1994 Merlin sticker album there isn’t – there are two. One is where he should be, by his own name, but another one is obscuring the empty pane that represents the Brian Deane I never found. I couldn’t bear having failed to complete my album, so safe in the knowledge that anyone simply skimming through to check for gaps would not notice my deception I duplicated my Garys. I hereby apologise fully to all teenage sticker collectors for invalidating the joy of an honest completion, to all the staff at Merlin and mostly to my friend Lee, whom I told I had finished my sticker book simply because I was jealous that he had finished his … or had he really? I have my doubts!

  The guilt I feel is genuine, but in truth it is not so much guilt at having deceived my friends, but a still burning ember of disappointment deep in my soul at my failure to complete the book honestly. Yes, I take my life that seriously. My fear of failure is so extreme that even when on my own I find it difficult to accept mistakes. Like most men who live alone, there are tell-tale signs in my décor and furniture that I am a bachelor. There is, for example, no settee in my living room. I experimented with one for a while, but found that with space relatively tight in a living-room/diner, the room taken up by the extra seat simply could not be justified when weighed up against the number of visitors I receive. It was duly replaced by a leather reclining massage chair and, with some rejigging, the extra space was put to good use and allowed for the purchase of a much bigger television and a drinks table.

  The most obvious sign of my singledom is probably the dartboard which hangs on the back of the door (or when the dartboard is put away behind the table, the thousands of tiny dart holes covering the door, but for a small circle in the upper middle). There is something in the rhythmic back and forth of darts, the clearly defined boundaries and the rewards it offers for accuracy and repetition that I enjoy. My favourite pub game is, of course, snooker. Any game whose rules basically amount to finding a table covered in mess and slowly and methodically putting it all away out of sight is one with which I can empathise emphatically.

  As much as I enjoy darts, I must confess to not being very good at it, hence the holes in the door. And the door frame. And even the skirting board. The reason I am not very good at darts, and the reason I am not very good at many things, is my stubborn refusal to accept my shortcomings. Each time I throw a dart and miss my intended target, instead of trying to work out what went wrong and correct my technique for long-term success, I get so pissed off with myself that the next two darts are bound to be even wider off the mark than the first.

  Professional players have reacted with greater calm and m
aturity to missing vital darts in World Championship finals than I have on my own at 2am on a wet Tuesday night in my shitty little flat. It won’t be long before the dartboard annoys me so much that I react as any true man might when threatened – by breaking it and hiding it in the garage. In my garage exists a shrine to the person I promised I would become; a man who can paint great works of art, play squash to international standards, and write and compose his own guitar concertos. The history of his heartache is etched across a landscape of broken-stringed racquets and half-painted canvases with the word ‘BASTARD’ drunkenly scrawled across them in black paint.

  I cannot bear to be bad at things I love. I long to play the piano but the sound I make with my clumsy fingers crashing down irregularly on the keys is enough to shatter my spine. Like loving someone so much that all you can bear to do is strangle them to death for fear that they might not love you back, I can never go near a brand new piano in case of what might happen.

  I hope that in these pages there will be some counsel for anyone who has ever lost their temper at an inanimate object, for those lost sheep who have sacrificed whole afternoons calling a biro a shiteater because it ran out part way through an important document. It is not the pen that is to blame, of course, but the entire cosmos that has decided to make you its victim for that day – but you can’t very well snap the cosmos in half and jump all over it can you? That is a much longer game.

  RICHARDSON’S LAW OF MOMENTS

  There will, of course, be a small number of people reading this who will not be able to associate at all with the desire to do things in a certain way time after time. If you think you fall into that category, then you should be made aware of this fact: I probably wouldn’t click with you if we met. I doubt it bothers you, since by nature you are probably an impulsive person who doesn’t carry with them the rejections of the past, preferring instead to ‘live for the moment’. Well, let me tell you that you can keep your moments; I for one do not like the present.