You know when you’ve made a set of plans that leave you pretty busy but you can just about do everything and then someone adds something extra and you’re left thinking…shit how am I going to do all this stuff?!
That’s kind of how the summer has started for me and I’m also going to use it as my excuse for no blog since May! This is my review of my shows at Brighton Fringe…
So, a few weeks ago me and a bunch of friends old and new spent the weekend filming a video for my jazz cover of the Vanilla Ice ‘classic’ Ice Ice Baby, I’m delighted to say it’s now ready and will be featuring in my new comedy show Jim Bowes: Obsession – but if you want to see it now you can…
It’s hard to believe that it’s May already. Two days before the closest General Election for a generation if the press are to be believed and I’ve found myself unable to stop thinking about my local candidates for reasons entriely unrelated to their party politics.
I’ve got George Galloway of the Respect Party touring the area on an open top bus, I can only think of him offering to be ‘the cat’ on Celebrity Big Brother and Jim Fitzpatrick the labour candidate seems to be best known for walking out of a Muslim wedding earlier in the year.
I’ve barely seen any mailshots from the Liberal democrats which suggests maybe they’re not holding out much hope. The same can’t be said for the conservatives who’ve been on a direct mail and billboard frenzy. Ian from Congleton is about 20 ft tall on the Highway, pretty much opposite The Times/Sun offices. Congleton is in Cheshire but I doubt most the people driving toward the Rotherhithe tunnel care that much. I just think, oh I used to live near there.
Some boundary changes mean they’ve got a shout as the nice bits of Wapping and St. Katherine’s dock are now in my area. I shop in that Waitrose, does that mean I’m under some kind of unspoken voting contract?
I had been tracking the direct mail I’d received relating to the election but I have to say it all got too much. So my only comment is this: Neither the Labour or Conservative parties used Royal Mail to send their post, this made me a little bit sad.
That’s probably enough politics and so to some other things from this blog title…
» Read more: A banker no more, show progress, video shoot, chocolate return
So, since the end of October I’ve been avoiding crisps and chocolate and I’ve been doing pretty well.
Eating chocolate at Christmas was allowed – as long as I was socialising with family, I took advantage of that. However there have been a couple of failings:
So, if you can forgive me perhaps we can move past this? On the plus side I did successfully implement the largest web project I’ve done to date (take a look www.barclays.co.uk) and I’ve not eaten a single crisp….
So after flirting with tweeting regularly and installing a clever plugin that automatically updated my blog with a weekly round up of my tweets I’ve accepted that this is lame way to maintain my (or any) blog and to that end I’ve stopped it this morning.
Instead I’ve decided to go back to the less-frequent-but-more-informative blogs actually written in one go by me rather than random 140 character mini-blogs all added together.
» Read more: End of the regular tweet, work, book, Josaka and life
I’m now well and truly in to my second week of time off work. So the plan was to use up the holiday I rolled over from last year to fit in some writing, celebrate Ruth’s birthday at Reading beer festival over the bank holiday weekend catch up with some friends and life in general.
On the Sunday before the offical break started we caught up with my friends Oli Silk and his girlfriend Eve who are just about to leave for America for 6 months – Oli is number one in the smooth jazz airplay chart over there so hopefully they’re in for a successful time doing gigs and shifting copies of his album (in shops now).
So in two weeks it’s the Josaka 10th birthday gig and I made a firm commitment that once that’s done I’ll be making a proper start on my 3rd Edinburgh show – Jim Bowes: Obsession.
Frankly, I’m easily distracted and so I’m going to need the help of all the people around me (again). The new show is a challenge, a personal mission and in places makes me think a lot about the things that have made me who I am. Don’t worry, it’ll be funny too.
So that you’re up to speed here’s how it started. Ruth and I were having lunch with Kevin Harrington for his 50th birthday and we got talking about some ideas for a show I had, about obsession. I’d noticed how people have their personal obsessions, obvious and minor and how these run through families, friendship and social groups.Â
We also have national obsessions – at the time it was climate change and right now it’s the credit crunch (in all honesty my life hasn’t changed much, has yours?), if it’d save the banks or create jobs I’m sure most people would burn the forests at the moment. What a difference 6 months makes. I felt like this was a subject I wanted to explore.
In the run up to Christmas we went to see Ben Marwood ar Proud Galleries (good venue, wine that gave Ruth and I a terrible hangover) supporting Frank Turner… it was great and packed. It did mean that I had to speak to Ben and admit I hadn’t delivered my promised chapter by chapter breakdown within the agreed timeframe.
Ben is a thoroughly reasonable chap and to that end gave me a new deadline of the end of the year. As my friend Adam would say “if a jobs worth doing, it’s worth doing last minute” and that’s what I did; while Ruth was out at the pub with friends I spent the afternoon of New Years Eve writing the chapter by chapter breakdown for my first book. Job done.
I guess now I have to start writing the book proper!
I’ll be performing in some form or other at The Oakford Social Club on Christmas Eve. Me, my radio mic, some great bands and a lot of drink.
More info here:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=38182533195
Jim x
Picking up from where we left off Ben replied to me saying:
hahah, i like it. very good. if only Dave Gorman hadn’t called some kind of secret shotgun on making a book out of what is essentially a blog, i’d suggest you do the same. and i wouldn’t worry about the amount of words the average book contains, because who wants to write an average book?
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