It’s a King Lear kind of a day in LA with lowering winds pushing down trees and tipping over telegraph poles and the remains of shredded parasols lie in shrouds by the sides of pools. I’m preparing to set out on the road, on an Expedition with Major Cleese, in search of intelligent life in the Antipodes.<\/p>\n
Currently I\u2019m packing.<\/p>\n
No, sorry, Yanks, I don\u2019t mean I\u2019m carrying concealed weapons, I mean I\u2019m packing as in Suitcase<\/em>.\u00a0 Packing up clothes and books and guitars.\u00a0 And of course meds.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the nice thing about age: in the old days we had drugs. Now we have\u00a0medication.<\/p>\n I have a whole shitload of bottles and vials and injectables, whose sell-by date is hopefully ahead of mine, and most of whose functions I can only guess at. However if World War Three breaks out while I\u2019m downunda I\u2019m covered.\u00a0 I\u2019ll be On The Beach<\/em> with a copy of Neville Shute and a bag full of emergency suppositories.<\/p>\n Meanwhile I am discussing with the wife who should play us in the movie of our lives.<\/p>\n \u201cAngelina Jolie\u201d she suggests.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd who will play you?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n I have also been trying to write some new gags for the road.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are two types of people, and I don\u2019t much care for either of them.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a 72 year old man embarking on a mid- life crisis. It should be over by the time I am 145.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n That sort of thing. The kind of one liner I used to be paid by David Frost to churn out, when I was just a writer. I love saying Just a Writer.\u00a0 It\u2019s a bitter writer\u2019s gag.<\/p>\n Shakespeare?\u00a0\u00a0 Just a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n I have decided to announce I am working on my Autobiography. It\u2019s title?<\/p>\n \u201cAre those my underpants? \u201c<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n My wife finds this spectacularly unfunny.\u00a0\u00a0 My assistant Alana howls with laughter.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not really working on my Autobiography though I was asked to write it in the year of The Python Final Farewell Show<\/em> at O2.\u00a0 (2014)\u00a0 Publishers offered me a ton of money, but I worried that John Cleese was shortly coming out with his own memoirs and it seemed to invite odious comparisons from the insidious Daily Mole.*\u00a0 So I declined.<\/p>\n *name changed to protect the guilty.<\/p>\n The point of autobiography is that it\u2019s your last chance to be rude about people you love, especially old wives, and friends and work mates who never did you any harm, but sadly I find that with age I have become more forgiving. I know.\u00a0\u00a0 I apologise.\u00a0 If you can\u2019t think ill of your fellow man then who are you?\u00a0\u00a0 But I don\u2019t.\u00a0 I can\u2019t be bothered to carry a grudge any more. Even on Twitter where the ground rules invite abuse I find it much more fun to forgive people.\u00a0 It\u2019s far more effective.\u00a0 They can\u2019t stand it. Turning the other cheek that\u2019s fucking asking for it.\u00a0 Look how many people Ghandi annoyed by fasting and being forgiving.\u00a0 It\u2019s far and away the most annoyingly passive aggressive thing \u00a0you can do.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not much of a diarist. I think we can leave the detailed daily form to our good Mrs. Dale, Michael Palin, who is constantly painting the Forth Bridge of his life a day at a time.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m going to stick to blogging.\u00a0 A series of self-indulgent essays about how wonderful I am.\u00a0 Think of it as the equivalent of a morning dump, cleaning out the shit in my mind.<\/p>\n So yes I\u2019m packing.<\/p>\n Will I need that frilly nightie?\u00a0\u00a0 How about an emergency garter belt?\u00a0\u00a0 You never know.\u00a0 Spanx?\u00a0 Yes or no?\u00a0 And what colour eye-liner? \u00a0\u00a0Panties?\u00a0 Shall I take a selection?\u00a0 Lip gloss. Check. You see the thousands of decisions that we people in showbiz have to make.<\/p>\n As it happens I have a Degree in Packing.<\/p>\n Twelve years of boarding school, three terms a year, there and back, is six packs a year.\u00a0 That\u2019s 72 packings.\u00a0 Then there\u2019s College, and then there\u2019s filming, \u00a0oh the whole thing is endless.\u00a0 I\u2019m either packing, unpacking or preparing to pack of unpack.\u00a0\u00a0 If you count the arrival in Sydney for a hellish day of publicity we\u2019re going to be in ten different cities in a little over a month and a half.<\/p>\n So I have pioneered a whole new packing technique. It\u2019s called:<\/p>\n Packing Backwards.<\/strong><\/p>\n You just visualize the last place you will be visiting on your travels and then start with that.\u00a0\u00a0 Since I will be in Tahiti that\u2019s easy.\u00a0 A pair of Speedo\u2019s, a travel guitar and a hat.<\/p>\n Before that we\u2019re in New Zealand, and that could be tricky. Is Wellington at the end of March chilly?\u00a0\u00a0 Ought I to wear wool close to the skin?\u00a0 Is Mourhino a sheep?\u00a0 And how about Auckland? \u00a0\u00a0Do they still get quite so drunk?\u00a0\u00a0 Will I need a special garment to protect my clothes?\u00a0 And what\u00a0 if we have to visit a sewage farm?\u00a0\u00a0Will they provide Wellingtons in Wellington?\u00a0 \u00a0I know they named a sewage facility after John and it is my ambition to have one named after me.<\/p>\n Before that we\u2019re in Melbourne, and by the look of it it\u2019s deucedly hot there.\u00a0\u00a0 In fact all Australia looks like it will be very hot.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Perth is boiling and we start up on The Gold Coast.\u00a0 It\u2019s a quandary.<\/p>\n In Sydney, the first stop, we are scheduled to appear on breakfast TV and basically give interviews all day.\u00a0\u00a0 This is a typical Australian joke.\u00a0 They get you jet-lagged off the plane and ask \u201cWhat do you think of Australia?\u201d\u00a0 Since you\u2019ve only seen the frigging airport and you\u2019re so bleary eyed you can\u2019t even remember your own name, it\u2019s tough to come up with a funny response.<\/p>\n How I miss the days of Norman Gunston when he greeted celebrities with his brilliantly bad questions\u2026<\/p>\n To Linda McCartney:\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cYou don\u2019t look very Japanese to me.\u201d<\/p>\n He pioneered a whole new school of celebrity interview, where the interviewer is not real.\u00a0\u00a0 Sacha Baron of course nailed it in many disguises.<\/p>\n Ah well, Time to go shopping\u2026. so wellingtons, Spanx, and special undergarments….<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chapter 2. Packing Backwards It’s a King Lear kind of a day in LA with lowering winds pushing down trees and tipping over telegraph poles and the remains of shredded parasols lie in shrouds by the sides of pools. I’m preparing to set out on the road, on an Expedition with Major Cleese, in search […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":566,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions\/566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}