Wednesday 1st April 2026
There’s just eight days to go before ‘The SMALL Stuff’ debuts next week in Clapham and I am understandably preoccupied with the prep. It’s full on and unusually for me, as things stand, I’m not doing any gigs before that. That may be the right thing. It may not. I have now reached the stage of full rehearsals.I did four yesterday, that’s four x 1hr rehearsals. It should have been five, but I got caught up in some annoying stuff with the council in the morning that I had to sort out. Today, I am aiming for the five. Exercising and runs are taking a backseat to this, though maybe I can get out for a run later.
There’s about 15-20 minutes of new stuff within that hour that I need to nail. Some of it right now is working, too much of it isn’t because despite running through each line hundreds of times, it’s just not being seared into my muscle memory. This is a lot for me. I am struggling with my focus in general and the last couple of weeks, with my friend passing and a close relative now in hospital, that default-these-days-fragile-focus is even more stretched. But I will need to plough through it.
I had resisted the first kebab of the year all weekend. As I was rehearsing well into the evening yesterday, I hadn’t made anything to eat so I thought, ‘I’ll venture out for the kebab’, which is only across the road, but before that, I’ll walk to the nearest TesSainsCo Convenience store, those annoying small iterations of those once great supermarkets that now dominate every high street and grab some milk. I got to the shop, only I couldn’t find my wallet. I could believe it. This is typical of me since Long Covid frazzled my brain. I headed back home. I had the kebab money on me but not the milk money.
Once home, I couldn’t find the wallet. I checked my jackets. The wallet definitely wasn’t in the usual pocket. These days I wear a gilet over the jacket which is an extraordinary development because I have never liked them, but let me tell you, with Long Covid wrecking my ability to regulate my body temperature, the gilet was invaluable to me over the winter so it’ll be with me for life now. And there was the wallet. In one of the gilet pockets. Risky given the zip up pockets for the gilet have been near unusable since week 1. I have tried to replace it but not many stores have them in stock now. I will have to wait until late summer, early autumn before I can replace it.
Oh, I didn’t get the milk in the end. I have a local shop across the road from me. For a few years now, I’ve not been keen on the Freshways milk so haven’t bought any for 5 or 6 years now. But last night, after having to come back home for the wallet that was actually on me, I thought as it was an emergency, I’d just try the local shop. It was converted to a Londis before Christmas. Those guys are notorious for their high prices. £1.50 for 2 pints of milk when I get 4 pints for £1.60/65, no chance. I walked away from the milk. It was the right decision.
It was a milkless evening.
The first show will be the seat of the pants one. The second one should be better. Longterm I do need to try and get my marketing and social media skills up to scratch. I’ve been doing social media for nearly 20 years and I was brilliant at it, but today’s social media, all about reels and fancy videos targeted at the increasingly shorter attention spans of today’s generation mean this is a very different social media, far less fun. Now it’s about strategies, selling, getting people to part with money in an age when a generation is growing up expecting free entry for so many things and bucket donation at the end. I have a lot of work to do to adapt to this new age.
I am trying to get on a course that helps me learn something like Canva. I have made numerous attempts with this and Bazaart, but it’s just not my thing. We can’t all be good at everything, and I am certainly not good at design. I can visualise how something should look, but designing it, as things stand, is beyond me. It’s also something else that takes you away from your work. Until I nail this though, it’s likely any show I do will be a hard sell.
I am hoping to release Facebook or Instagram ads in the next day or two, though I know these are hit and miss. Late in the day for next week’s first show, but they might do something ahead of the second one on the 20th and I am going to have to accept that the bulk of the audience is going to be made up of the odd friend and peers, which is not ideal for a comic. That is a hard audience to perform to. I would much rather have complete strangers.
In terms of today, in-between each rehearsal, I think I will also just run through the new bits that are causing me trouble, though that will take a lot of time up. I also need to memorise the running order of the whole set. To be fair, I am really good at learning these on the day. I don’t have a regular set and in changing my set at every gig, I constantly run through the rejigged setlist order in my head on the day and I am finding I am really good at it. Which as I have said to a few people in the last few months may be effective at stalling dementia if that ever comes my way. Trying to memorise the running order for a complete hour though will be significantly harder.
I should have already started today’s rehearsals. But here I am faffing around on here because I’m waiting for a callback from BT/EE/Open Reach, whoever they are these days, as their failure to install fibre optic in the property now reaches its eighteenth month. These once great bastions of the UK, BT, the Royal Mail and others are absolutely useless these days. I think most of us will have experienced how difficult it is to get anything done with these guys now.
I know from what I have learnt in the various clinics I have been in that this issue with focus, watching your days slip away, is the LC. I have never been like this. I found some notes the other day from my days of doing my old historical football podcast ‘When Shorts Were Short’, a brilliant show if I may say so, but like ‘The SMALL Stuff’ is set to be, a commercial disaster. I managed every single thing of that football show on my own and it was a colossal project but I was so in the zone. I was a superb administrator. And I was still doing this going into the third year of the pandemic when I fell to Covid a second time. I was still in that zone, that headspace. I could manage massive projects. That’s what this work in progress needs but I just don’t have it anymore, so I’m really having to do what I can.
The focus now is on just doing a good show. Worry about promoting Brighton once the London shows are done and just accept this is where I am now. I’m more than fine on stage though next week will test that given how far behind the show has fallen and I can’t really work from notes as I’d need to be putting my glasses on and off, and I find that level of multi-tasking hard. It creates a barrier between you and the audience, the lights are bouncing off your lenses and so on. I just want the show to be good now. Going forward, hopefully I can work on the marketing side of things and improve that.
