Finish lines

Husband-and-wife comedians and commentators Michele A’Court and Jeremy Elwood share their views.

My granddaughter is terrible at goodbyes. She is spectacular on arrival – throws herself at you with full-body joy and, if there’s time before she buries her face in whichever part of you she can currently reach, she will shriek your name with more gusto than anyone else ever has. But leaving? She is suddenly cross with everyone, won’t put her shoes on and refuses kisses. It looks like she doesn’t like you, that this was a terrible visit but, really, it’s the opposite. She doesn’t like leaving.

Eventually, when you are as old as a nana, you get used to goodbyes. Goodbyes happen all the time, and are frequently followed by hellos (if you’re a glass-halffull kind of grown-up); but when you are 4, there is less evidence of this pattern. Goodbye just means going, and comes with less promise of return.

Yeah, I get a bit bloody existential in autumn. There’s nothing like a drop in humidity to clear the head and ponder the human condition. Less poetically, this particular Easter also marked the end of the financial year (ooh, paperwork), ticked off the first quarter of the calendar (which suggests we might begin to see the shape and texture of 2018), and brought the end of daylight saving (at which point my body clock goes out of whack and can’t tell if it’s time to do another load of washing or bring in what I’ve managed).

I hardly ever get to the end of things. By which I don’t mean that I never get anything done, but that nothing is finished. Housework drives you barmy – there’s a split second of completion and then someone comes home to see it and forgets to wipe their feet. Dinner is never over because there are dishes and leftovers, then shopping lists because you’re probably going to eat again tomorrow. A show always needs tweaking. There is always another deadline. Parenting never stops.

I am more than usually aware of this because, last week, I launched a book. It is finished. Sure, I will talk about it, answer questions, and read bits of it to people who are interested, but I can’t work on it any more. The Oxford commas stay in.

While I was writing it, a couple of nice men came and built us a new roof. After they’d gone, I looked at the shiny red steel (grey is very popular, one of them said) and envied them. They came, they built, they drove away. One of them sent me a video of it – possibly shot for warrantee purposes, but I like to think that, on a meandering kind of day, he might look at our roof and think: “I built that. It’s finished.” I know how that might feel.

When I was at school, exams were my thing. I was good at them, enjoyed them even. I have no idea where I got it from, but I appear to have an ability to absorb information and then retrieve it when called on.

Internal assessment, on the other hand, was my nemesis. So, whilst I aced what were then 5th and 7th forms, 6th form was a disaster, as that was the year where what you did on a daily basis counted far more than the three hours in a locked room at the end of the year.

Perhaps this is why, for most of my adult life, I have arranged my years to unconsciously mimic the traditional school year. I usually have three or four months of preparatory work leading to a break of some kind; either an actual holiday, or the culmination of the aforementioned work.

Theatre, for example, usually consists of six to eight weeks of rehearsal – the “absorbing of information”, followed by three to four weeks of performances – the “exam”. Comedy festival shows, at least for me, are 11 months of grabbing strands of ideas followed by a month of trying to knit those strands into something recognisable. (Also, speaking the show out loud the night before it opens to the public, realising it doesn’t have an ending, and staying up all night trying to write one, but that’s another story.)

After this process ends, I tend to dive into a period of postperformance blues. This could be explained by a chemical comedown from the adrenaline rush of public performances, but also, I think, it is down to the fact that whatever I’ve just done is finished, permanently. My performance on any given night exists only in the minds of the audience who were there to witness it (and sometimes that’s a very good thing).

Because although I have written a lot, I have never written anything that is going to last. I’ve never written a film, or an album, or a book. I write things that hit a deadline, and then move on to the next thing. It’s the exam mentality writ large, where I throw everything at that one moment, but lack the day-to-day discipline that a long-term project demands.

I will, one day. Probably. This isn’t a “poor me” column, but rather an observation. When it comes to hitting the mark on time, and with some cohesion, I’m your guy – that’s why these days I happily write daily television and live comedy, but I also feel like the year ahead is stretching without end.

It’s also a really circumspect way of telling Michele I’m very proud of her finishing her book, and we should book a holiday.