Last night at around midnight, my phone rang.
I had gone to bed early with Alex James from Blur…. or at least his autobiography, every page of which makes me reassess my life as a sober, monogamous, low volume, run of the mill existence. He didn’t sleep for days at a time and estimates that he spent over a million quid on champagne and cocaine. Meanwhile, I spend my Friday evening under IKEA sheets, drinking herbal tea and reading about other people’s hedonistic excess. What a waste!
I was trying to console myself with the fact that I had spent the afternoon doing a photo shoot and being interviewed by Corren, Sweden’s regional newspaper of the year… I bet Blur never did that. Psyche.
Incidentally, the ‘rak lång’ photo worked out well… my suggestions were rejected as largely impractical and they wanted to do something simple on a park bench…. I looked at the driving rain, thought quickly and came up with an alternative…. In the end I got them to photograph me through the library windows reading a book about Sweden (i.e. me: inside, warm and dry; them: outside, cold and wet…. Clever, huh?)
The midnight phone call got my hopes up slightly that it was an invite to a wild and crazy rock and roll orgy… but instead it was my friend Ben (yes, another Ben). He was ringing to confess to me that he had got to his late 30’s and did not know how to change a wheel on a car. He had come to this realisation several seconds after getting a puncture in the middle of Linköping on a Friday night. Could I help?
I did what any good friend would do: Laughed uproariously at his mechanical inadequacy and went back to bed…. Obviously, a sense of guilt is a hard thing to ignore, but not as hard as a phone that won’t stop ringing, so twenty minutes later I found myself in town ready to change a tyre.
Changing tyres is one of those things that any ‘real’ man knows instinctively how to do. I have to admit that I am not that good at it as it is something that I only learnt when I was in my mid-twenties, and as chance would have it, I was taught by the comedian Marcus Brigstocke. In Sweden, when it comes to changing from summer to winter tyres, it is usually my girlfriend’s dad who does most of the graft.
Luckily, by the time I got there, Ben had befriended some passers by who also happened to be mechanics. They were quicker and more efficient than I would have been, so I was quite grateful that I only had to watch. It made me think that we all have our roles in life. Ben is a nurse who doesn’t know how to change a tyre, and I would rather have him around in a medical emergency than the mechanics who knew how to jack up a V70.
Me, I’m a chancer who stands on stage and tells jokes, but at least I know how to change a tyre.
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