"I am a lonely visitor, I came too late to cause a stir"

After a worryingly long time without having read any books, I've just finished two in really quick succession. I finally got round to reading Andrew Collings' rather excellent Where Did It All Go Right? (mostly in the bath. But don't try and read very much into that), and just this morning I finished his colleague Richard Herrin's first volume of his Warming Up blog (Bye Bye Balham), covering the first six months of entries.

One could question the logic behind spending £10 on a book that I could read online. But books are better. And there are footnotes giving more detail that he felt he wasn't able to discuss at the time, but with the passage of five years he felt able to be more public about some events. Like the operation on his penis.

It covers a fairly eventful time of his life. At the start he was in a fairly intense, fast moving relationship that he thought was perfect, he was moving into a new house partly so he could be closer to his girlfriend, then by the end when he'd moved in his relationship was over and, in his own words, "it meant my two main reasons for upping sticks were now no longer valid. I felt a bit displaced, and lonely".

I'll have to wait until volume two to see if the similarities continue. Or perhaps I could just read the blog online. I won't get the footnotes though.

Perhaps my life will continue as a mirror of Richard Herring's though. Perhaps our lives will continue in parallel, yet be different in subtle ways. Perhaps the current comedy stars of the day (Horne and Corden possibly. I should suggest this as an idea for them. They'll do any old rubbish) will make it into a film. Maybe it should be called The Life of Ian.


I do realise that this entry is filled with far more just to amuse myself (and perhaps other obsessive Richard Herring fans. But I don't think any of them read this. I don't think anybody at all reads this actually) than usual. But I don't care. I'm mostly writing this to waste time until I can justify making lunch.