James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes
Page 23
My greatest achievement
Farewell
At the start of the book I said that if you compare the first story to the final story you’ll see that they essentially happen to the same person, a person who has learned nothing throughout his entire life. And that’s more or less true. There’s no lesson at the end of all these mistakes, I’m afraid. The lesson was going to be ‘don’t do any of the stuff I did’, but I doubt you were planning on doing that anyway.
While writing up all the scrapes I did realise that the reason these things seem to happen to me more than the average person is because I tend to go along with things instead of approaching anything with caution, so I guess the only lesson of the book is this: do not be open to new experiences, avoid anything that could potentially not work out for you, and enter into everything with the utmost suspicion. Never ‘let yourself go’, do not trust anybody and never ever put yourself out there (emotionally or physically). What I’m saying is, don’t take any risks and you’ll be fine.
Cool.
Oh, and you shouldn’t let yourself into someone’s house and take a crap in their downstairs toilet without their knowledge or permission either.
Oddly, since telling these stories on Josh’s show I hardly ever get into any scrapes any more. I’ve no idea why this is. Maybe because I’m older and have my wits about me a little bit more, or maybe talking about all these scrapes on the show every week was actually a form of therapy I didn’t even realise I was taking part in. Maybe through explaining and analysing all of these past events I’ve cured myself somehow and am now a stable and sensible human being. Or maybe I am just less open than I used to be. Maybe once a person gets past thirty they don’t say yes to everything, hoping something amazing will happen; we just assume it won’t and don’t roll the dice as often. When put like that it’s kind of depressing. Also, I just called myself ‘stable and sensible’ which is a lie and one that I will get called out on by the friends and family who will read this book (after all, they may be the only people who do).
I can’t say I miss those days but, like a lot of people, I look back on my past misfortunes fondly. No matter how bad something was the first time around, I love reminiscing about it as if those were the golden days. If I walked past that bush in Basingstoke today I’d stop and look at it wistfully, remembering that night as though it were my own wedding day when in actual fact it was a waking nightmare and there’s no way I would want to go through it ever again. It’s very easy to idealise a more innocent time in your life. That time when you were more naïve, more optimistic. I think these are the main two ingredients needed when getting into scrapes – naïvety and optimism. As long as you have those two things there will be no end to the binds you’ll get yourself into.
Obviously, I’ll surely experience more scrapes as time goes on but it strikes me as a little curious that none have taken place since the show ended. What will most likely happen is that the day this book comes out, an almighty scrape will befall me and it’ll sting doubly hard because I could’ve put it in the book if it had just happened a couple of months earlier. I would then have to go around deliberately trying to get into scrapes in order to accrue enough tales to fill a second book. Although I sincerely hope there is no second book; I just want to have a nice life. Please, God.
And so, I hope this is goodbye. As far as such stories go, at least. Thank you for reading my book and thank you to those of you who listened to us when we did the radio show too.
And if you’re the kind of person who gets into a lot of scrapes then my thoughts are with you: may the universe guide you and catch you every time you fall, may your friends learn from your mistakes, and may all bystanders laugh at them. But with each and every scrape may you grow stronger, smarter and more resilient. May you see humour in your own downfall and silver linings in every cloud, albeit clouds that you yourself have created, like mushroom clouds as opposed to cumulus clouds and other nice types of cloud. Some people are lucky: they grasp the world immediately, they understand how everything works and appear to breeze through each day without a care in the world. But others have to learn the hard way and at the end of the day, maybe they turn out to be the wisest of them all. For they not only understand how to live life but they also understand how not to live life. Failure cannot be understood in theory, only in practice, sometimes over and over and over again. Only when one has experienced both sides of the coin can one understand the true value of that coin. Yes, if you only look at the side of the coin that says the value on it then maybe you can say the value is 10p or what have you but it’s not the same as looking at both sides and absorbing all the information, the details, the pattern (there’s probably a nice drawing on the other side that you wouldn’t have seen if you’d just stayed on the side with the value written on it, for example); only then can you completely understand as oppose to just knowing how much the coin is really worth, and the same applies to bank notes also. I once saw a poster in an office that read, ‘Your best teacher is your last mistake’ and it filled me with pride. I may not have gone to university but my god, have I been educated. My professors were a skydiving instructor, a French porcelain salesman, a nobhead named Alistair and a nine-year-old boy with unlimited access to cabbages. They are the ones who set my exams. And yes I failed those exams but in failing them I actually passed them because that’s the way you pass an exam about mistakes – you fail. And all the people who ‘pass’ the exam are the ones who actually fail the exam in the end. But in doing so maybe they also end up passing them because they failed. I don’t work on an exam board; maybe everyone passes because everyone fails. And isn’t that what life is all about? We are all failures and as such we are roaring successes. Each and every one of us.
When I was a baby I urinated into my own mouth. Thirty-two years on, I regret nothing.
Except crashing all those cars.
Footnotes
Jobs
1 I wasn’t actually present when this took place; it was told to me by the kitchen staff and to be fair there were a lot of liars who worked at this particular pub. However, either way I love it and the fact that I believe it, even if it didn’t happen, lets you know exactly what kind of a place this was to work in.
Pindrop
2 I am referring to ‘La La La Humpty’.
Ice Skating
3 I still don’t understand how I managed this but I was, and still am, very gangly.
Déjà Vu
4 Maybe they do; I’ve never smoked them either – I’m a very good boy.
Festival
5 An African drum that looks like an hourglass-shaped conga.
Badminton
6 Haha, shuttlecock.
7 Haha, shuttlecock.
Xmas Tree
8I managed to re-home AK with the friends who had found the W in Northampton. They still have him to this day and he has since acquired a prom queen sash. He’s loving life.