The John Robins Vibemail - Issue #21

Current Mood: Photo Dump

Hello everyone! Yes it’s me! After all this time! It really has been a huge chasm since last we digitally met, not a single update from me throughout my tour, for which I apologise, but may well touch on later. I do hope you are sailing along as well as can be expected in the sometimes directionless waters of mid-Jan. Please forgive the lack of adherence to previous Vibemail formatting norms in this message, but it may be a long one and not come out in neatly and amusingly titled sections. But rest assured The Rt Venerable Sir Johnny JR OBE is present and correct and reporting for duty!

Razors

I guess the reason I’m writing this is because I read another Substack and it made me realise that I should. I’m never going to be one of those people who religiously bashes out a piece of writing every week (cf. last Vibemail early Sept), but it’s easy to get into the habit of not doing things. The post in question was this (cue Substack’s slightly bulky way of displaying links to other Substacks…)

Leslie's Razors

I don’t know the author, nor have I read any of his other pieces, but I found going through his nine razors really interesting. It helped me get a bit of a grip on what my priorities are. I don’t necessarily agree with them all (number five in particular). But it’s nice to shake up the old bonce every so often, and maybe reading it will fire off something in your head that you hastily scribble onto the pages of the mind. It was sent to me by dear The Lovely Robin Allender, one of my great internet news hounds who sends me all sorts of relevant things and saves me much needed trawling. I love having a friend like that, a kind of human algorithm for the stuff I might like. His Substack is here

https://robinallender.substack.com/

And if you like his particular brand of superb recommendations and postgraduate-level essays on Joyce that no one asked him to write then check out an archive of his old website here

https://robinallender.tumblr.com/

Anyway, what this all lead me to feel, is that this year is going to be a different year for me. I hope if you will forgive a rather inward looking Vibemail, you may at least be rewarded with something that is of use to you.

Problems / Solutions

It’s been so long since I’ve been in touch, and you may well wonder why I’ve kept schtum during a stand-up tour. A time many would (and did) suggest is the most crucial period of Robins-Apologist Interaction (R.A.I)

The truth is I’ve been struggling a bit mind-wise, a mixture of the rigours of touring, holding quite a hefty show in the brain, feeling like I’m failing a lot of the time, and getting angry at myself for feeling like I’m failing when NUMEROUS TREND SETTERS tell me I’m not. So (and this is insane) I was wary of overtly encouraging people to come to a stand-up show I lacked confidence in. Luckily, and I am hugely mindful of this, a mixture of imposter-syndrome-inducing reviews, positive word of mouth, and the dedication of you wonderful people to the wide church of #RobinsContent meant that, bar a few hastily dashed-off instagram posts, the rooms were full without me having to blow a trumpet I was fearful I couldn’t play. Not only full, but full of the most incredibly welcoming, patient and responsive people. ie YOU. So thank you, thank you all from the B of my H.

There’s a problem and a solution for you right off the bat: maniac saved from self by other people.

More Problems / More Solutions

I am going to try and be more patient. That’s the broad theme. Impatience is one of my major character defects and has seeped into every area of my life. It’s allied to perfectionism, self-criticism, intolerance, self-centredness, self-pity and every other stick I have ever beaten myself or others with.

The worst way this manifests (save harrumphing when Elis is late) is in an exhausting drive for efficiency. Over the years this has provided the basis for many a stand-up routine, and some great moments on the radio show. It’s been very cathartic to creatively explore situations where i’ve driven myself insane - comparing dehumidifiers, thinking about cupboards and browsing slotted spoons. But off air / stage, it is absolutely exhausting. That’s right, I’m going to try and be LESS efficient!

The Scottish Perspective

I’m back from an incredible trip to the west of Scotland. It is the most beautiful place I have ever been. Full stop. Go on then, here’s a pic…

(A few people have asked for recommendations of places to go and here’s the thing: every single second of a five hour drive will blow your mind. I cannot really express just how constantly overwhelming the landscape is. The amount of swearing coming out of my mouth around every corner was insane. So just go anywhere. Go prepared, pack a hiking bag, and stop whenever you see something breathtaking, and walk towards it. (Obviously be safe, check routes, check weather, check how much light you have, wear the right stuff etc etc). On that, I cannot emphasise enough the importance of waterproof hiking boots (which mine were not) for maintaining the morale of all involved. As a result I shall be winging my way towards some Salomon X Ultra Mid GTX in a 10.5 quicker than you can say “stop moaning about your blasted wet feet John! You’re ruining the vibe!”)

But would it shock you to know that the person in that photo, was, at times, in complete mental turmoil? Thinking. Thinking about thinking. Thinking about thinking about thinking. There were moments when the experience of just being in my head was intolerable. Maybe you have experienced this too? Perhaps we all have? For someone in recovery from addiction (booze in my case) this is entirely expected. I am learning how to live sober, for years I couldn’t - so I drank.

Uh Oh! He’s back on about the old problems again!

Anyone who came to see Howl will recognise this as one of the themes. Alcohol, for about twenty years, solved the problem of me. It quietened that thinking, dulled certain voices and empowered others. It was a tool for changing the EQ of the mind. And then over the course of about six years it slowly, then dramatically, stopped working. The damage of continuing to drink outweighed the relief drinking gave from the torment of being me.

Keep it light John!

Now, without alcohol, I am left with that washing machine brain, spinning and spinning and spinning. I haven’t had a drink for just over fourteen months, but still that washing machine spins. Not always at 1400rpm (increase or decrease depending on your own brand of washing machine), sometimes it’s on a delicate cycle, sometimes for brief moments it pauses entirely.

But for the most part, Highlands or no Highlands, whether standing before a breathtaking view or getting in to the shower, it is on. What towel should I use? How long has that towel been out? Google how often to wash your towels! Aren’t you meant to wash shirts with towels? Why didn’t you wash your towel YESTERDAY when you washed that shirt! Google whether to wash shirts with towels! Oh God have you caused increase wear and tear in that shirt? That shirt cost you £60 and you never wear it! WHY DID YOU DO THAT?! WHY DID YOU BUY THAT SHIRT?! You never wear shirts! You should wear more shirts! But you wear them once and they need washing! And you have to wash them with towels! Why can’t you be the sort of person that just chucks it all in and doesn’t care?! What IS non bio washing powder anyway?! Should I hang the towel on the heated towel rail? Won’t that make the towel rail less efficient? Did you leave the towel rail on all night? WHY DID YOU DO THAT?! YOU FUCKING IDIOT JOHN JESUS CHRIST! Chill out! Stop having a go at yourself! Be kind! YOU’RE ALWAYS HAVING A GO AT YOURSELF YOU IDIOT! I need a drink…

I’m going to avoid going down a 12-step rabbit hole here, but suffice to say that initially, the attraction of any 12-step programme is that it offers a way out of the disaster of addiction, and (in my experience) it did. However, over time, it reveals itself to be far more than that: a design for how to live after you have stopped doing what you wanted to stop doing. It provides a tool kit for how to live in the problem of yourself without leaning on the substance or behaviour that did so much damage. I do have tools now, to deal with the problem of my head. I can meditate, I can call people, I can go to meetings, I can journal, I can exercise, I can beseech / pray to / scream at a power greater than myself to remove the obsession to drink, to remove my thoughts, to be kinder to others. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it works more slowly than I would like. But it works.

It’s the bit before it works that I’m struggling with. I had set exactly the same high standards for my recovery, as I set for every other area of my life. And when these high standards aren’t met, all hell breaks loose in an already war torn bonce.

However, you find me in the midst of a solution!

Something I read in The Power Of Now has, some months later, finally sunk in. I’m paraphrasing but it’s from page 36 in my edition.

The need to be right is a form of violence.

And not just a violence to other people (my first epiphany), but also to myself (my current epiphany). In everything I do I challenge myself to do it perfectly, with the most precise economy, be it economy of money, time or quality. Whether it’s brushing my teeth, booking plane tickets, filling up with petrol, performing stand-up, buying new hiking boots, making breakfast or not thinking about alcohol, I set myself an unachievable goal and go apeshit when I fail. And I’m sick of it. And I mean sick, it has made me ill.

I would like to say “It ends here!” or “No more!”, but I am old enough and foolish enough to know that this is never the case. But I am cheerful because the solution to this problem is patience, and patience is achievable, it is often a case of doing nothing so that something improves, as opposed to doing the thing faster, harder, better. This ties in with the third, fourth and ninth of Leslie’s Razors: “Compare yourself to the median person”, “Assume the present isn’t as important as it seems” and “Choose your mistakes”.

Maybe this all sprang from that Substack, maybe it sprang from my run today, where I stopped after 6k because my knee hurt and began to berate myself for having a hurt knee, maybe it sprang from every gym session I’ve ever done beginning with me thinking “you can’t do this because you haven’t been doing it enough” WHILST I’M FUCKING DOING IT! Maybe it sprang from complete exhaustion with my own thoughts, I dunno.

Maybe what it sprang from was the tour. I have always thought of myself as lazy, as someone who does just enough to get by. At school a teacher once took me aside and said “you’re in danger of cruising this course”. And I’ve always felt I’ve cruised whenever possible. And then I look at what I’ve done over the last year and my brain cannot compute how such a lazy drifter did all this stuff and stayed sober. But I really found the tour very hard. I made it hard for myself. I was too harsh a critic of minor mistakes. I set a standard I couldn’t satisfy. I guess what I’m saying is I couldn’t understand why someone so lazy was so disappointed in themselves when they made something almost perfect. Or good. Or very good. Or fine. But I really hauled myself over the coals. And the more people said they liked it the more my head would shout “IT WAS AWFUL! WHY ARE YOU SAYING THAT?! IT WASN’T FUNNY ENOUGH! I HATED IT!”. Madness.

I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying I don’t want to go through that again. And not because the show wasn’t good, because I know how much people liked it, and many of your messages about how much it helped you, or helped a friend really really effected me in the best possible way. Some people have reached out to say that seeing Howl helped them begin their own sober journey, and there is no way I can fully express, how in some of the my most difficult moments, the thought of that just got me through. Long story short (in a Cockney accent): I gottah sort me noggin’ aaht befow I do staaynd up agin! (trans. I’ve got to sort my noggin out before I do stand up again)

Part of it is just the sheer weight of carrying round that much material in your head. It’s about 10,000 words written down, the role of Hamlet has about the same, and he’s not in all the scenes! I don’t mean that as a brag, I’m just illustrating how I set myself up for repeated falls expecting it to come out perfectly night after night. Inevitably when saying that much stuff out loud bits will go wrong, I will stumble over words, jokes won’t land, I will miss out a sentence, the tech at Cardiff will be a complete shambles. But I hope the insight into my head that show gave, will explain how the act of performing felt completely beyond me. No show will ever be perfect, and I just couldn’t cope with that.

Some of you with tickets to the postponed Northampton and Winchester shows may have heard they’ve been cancelled. Rest assured the above is not an enormously unwieldy way of excusing that! But it is related. The reasons those shows were postponed was due to a scheduling conflict and a type of BAD CONCRETE. (Neither my fault). The plan was to join them up in Autumn 2024 with another thirty or so dates. I realised about half way into the tour that I wasn’t capable of holding that show in my head for another year, of doing it another thirty times, and the option of doing two shows a couple of months apart in ten months time just wasn’t feasible. So I decided to cancel them (my fault), for which I apologise.

That said, I will be releasing a recording of the show on Bandcamp in some form. Probably around March / April this year. I know it has value, and I was so consistently blown away by all the people who came to see it, it means so very much. I will pull my socks up and listen back to the recordings I have and make the necessary edits to create an acceptable representation of Howl for you to listen to.

The Beginning of the End of a Problem?

This was meant to be tied in with the above but I’ve kind of forgotten how. I was listening to a recent episode of The Rest Is Politics, where Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell were tasked with sharing some positive news from the often depressing modern political landscape. This show, for me, is a reason to be cheerful in itself. I feel comforted by the fact that two people from opposing political traditions can be so reasonable about things, make so much sense and also be so popular. I guess this ties in with the Razors of the Substack too. When Ian Leslie says

“poor political tactics often stem from ignorance of where the median voter is. Politicians and other public figures needn’t always follow the median voter (although in my view they should do so more often than not) but at a bare minimum they should make an effort to know and understand the median voter’s position.”

I think we would all agree we’ve seen a lot of “poor political tactics” over recent years. A mistake I’ve made is assuming that the more extreme, at times diabolical policies and behaviours of those in power have been enacted / expressed to please the many. And because these policies don’t reflect my values, pretty modest and reasonable values at that, then I must be the minority and that BUMS ME OUT.

But I wonder if that’s the trick they’re trying to play on us: to make us think ‘most people aren’t somewhere in the middle, so what’s the point?’. And I’m not talking about the middle 10%, I’m talking about the middle 80%, where most of us are. Where most of us care about protecting the vulnerable, and the environment, about encouraging people to be successful, to promote the arts, to have good schools and hospitals and pay people properly, to feel safe. I think we’ve been tricked into thinking that because someone feels differently about one thing, that somehow they’re on the opposing team to us in everything, that they represent an enormous uphill struggle against some labyrinthine other side who set the agenda.

Isn’t that how every awful person has ever got into power? Not just by appealing to the worst in us, but by persuading us that the best in us doesn’t make a difference. I just have a sense that actually most people don’t want migrants to be victimised, most people don’t want those fleeing war or torture to be sent to Rwanda, most people don’t want corruption to go unchecked. And that maybe we are about to turn a corner against populism, and all that brings with it. I guess what I mean is that populism might not be as popular as they would have us think.

AND THEN someone (The Lovely Robin again) sent me a screen grab from Twitter.

I don’t know whether it went viral or if you’ve seen it a billion times, I don’t really use Twitter anymore. But I love it this screen grab. It’s a load of (verified) bots agreeing with each other about how great The Godfather is, and it gave me such a surge of hope.

I blame Twitter, and social media more generally, for the catastrophic corrosion of our discourse, how we see each other, communicate with each other, how we are made to feel fear of being shamed, pre-emptive shame, shame itself, how it taught us to embrace the violence of being right. And yet here it is. This was always where it would end - bots agreeing with each other about how great The Godfather is. Isn’t that perfect! How wonderful would it be if we all just quietly exited Twitter and left them to it? Snuck out and closed the door on a billion pointless arguments, likes and retweets that would boil and boil forever without a single person reading them.

And I guess this tied in with my feeling of hope about people, and the beginning of the end to populism, and that mad period of hysteria we went through with Twitter, of pile-ons and fear of saying the wrong thing, or desperation to find out someone had said the wrong thing, of screen grabbing with glee, glee in the fact that WE WERE RIGHT! But at what cost being right? And with what violence!

I’m glad Elon Musk bought it. I’m glad he ruined it. It was already ruined. I am filled with hope by the arrogance of people like Elon Musk! I hope it ensures their eventual irrelevance.

So what have we learned?

Sorry the above is such a mess. Please forgive a bit more mess. Scotland was so wonderful, so wonderful that I kind of got photo fatigue. This is another way that drive for efficiency, perfectionism, the need to be right displays itself for me - the obsession with getting the perfect photo. Have you ever had that on holiday? A sense of low level disappointment that you are letting yourself down by not being able to perfectly capture, or consume, the environment you are currently in? I was left feeling like in order to do justice, to really experience it, that I would have to get inside a mountain, or eat it, in order to be it, to be there properly.

I watched a documentary about Kilian Jornet called Summits Of My Life: A Fine Line (another part of my mad approach to goals is deciding I might go for a run then googling every single blog, film and YouTube channel about the best runners in the world in order to give myself loads of reasons to hate myself for not being the best runner in the world when I’m running). Anyway, what really struck me as I watched this inhuman trail-runner / mountain goat / skiier was how freeing it must be to be in the most incredible landscape on the planet, and never once have to worry about taking a picture. He’s literally traversing Mont Blanc in his pants or whatever, his resting heart rate never exceeding 40 bpm and at no point is he saying “fucking iPhone! It keeps over exposing the sun!”. He’s just doing it. Albeit with a big focus on the goal, or the time, or the record or whatever. And, actually, the whole thing is being filmed by drones and a camera crew so maybe my point is complete dog shit. Ah well, I’ll chill out about the photos anyway.

haha! love how that observation completely derailed before my eyes. Kilian Jornet is more obsessed with capturing the experience on film than little old Johnny JR! What a win!

Another thing I get is this overwhelming sense of is other lives I haven’t lived. This is really heightened on holiday.

‘Look at that Ullapool fishmonger! He seems jolly! WHY AREN’T YOU AN ULLAPOOL FISHMONGER?! Oh John! If only you’d moved to Ullapool when you were eighteen and learned the fishmongering trade! THAT would be living! Oh God I’ve wasted my life not being an Ullapool fishmonger. Up early for the morning catch and chewing the cud with locals, before clocking off at 5pm and meeting your pals in the pub! But hang on, that hiking shop looks nice… Oh to work in a hiking shop on the shores of a Loch! THAT would really be something wouldn’t it?! Just advising about the latest Salomon X Ultra Mid GTX boots then closing up at 5pm and heading to the pub to play in your folk band! Oh John! What a sorry life you’ve lead not working in a hiking shop on the shores of a Loch! But wait…what’s that sound? A chainsaw in the forest?! HOLY COW! To be a chainsawsman in a forest! Oh to stride out in the morning for a day of forestry maintenance! The view of nature that only you have access too! Now THAT, THAT JOHN, WOULD BE LIVING! just sawing away before clocking off at 5pm to…

You get the picture. It all boils down to endless fantasies of not being me and going to the pub.

You may well think ‘What an ungrateful swine! He’s got the life! Oh to be a comedian! Oh to sit at the right hand of Elis James! Oh to play to hundreds of people and return to your dressing room shouting “fucking hell John! You forgot the fucking bit about the cheese grater you complete idiot!”. That would be the life!’

haha, does it ever end? In former days I would have bathed in the bleakness of an absolutely devastating poem by Philip Larkin on this very topic, but it is a little problematic in places (“women mostly” / “old ratbags”/ “birds”) something bothering you Phil?… But also I no longer believe in the “unbeatable slow machine” I don’t think that is the problem. Maybe the slowness is the solution? We have time!

It all returns to that attempt at having more patience, with myself and others. I no longer want to view life as an endless series of disappointments created solely by a drive for perfection. Whether it’s not flossing enough, or tripping up on my words in a tour show, my catastrophic failure to be an Ullapool fishmonger or inability to eat a mountain. Life will reveal itself. And that’s not to say our priorities can’t be bold, revolutionary even, but they should be kind, and simple. In all things I must ask myself am I living in the problem or the solution?

More Good News Alan

Anyway, this has served as a very odd precursor to telling you that I’m on the next series of Taskmaster!

Yes! Finally the plaintive cries and tweets to the wise creators of Britain’s foremost comedy show will be no more! Johnny JR is in da (Taskmaster) house!

The rest of the contestants, Joanne, Sophie, Nick and Steve are all FANTASTIC, just the loveliest people you could hope to spend time with. I’m so grateful for them, and everyone else in the Taskmaster crew. They really do have to clear up an awful lot of broken eggs / popped balloons / thrown ducks / spilled honey and still they find the time to be welcoming, accepting of ideas, plans and the odd strop thrown because “health” and “safety” means it’s “unwise” to “set yourself” on “fire”. How patient they are! I do hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Weird how stuff works out, a life beyond my wildest dreams eh?

So there you have it! That’s me for now. Maybe too much of me.

I’m also looking forward to starting the bigger / smaller / pre recorded / live / podcast / radio show with Elis in a couple of weeks time. I’m off again before then. Maybe I’ll write something some day, which is like this but longer and shorter and less winding. But I will be trying to be more patient with myself, others and the world. And I’ll probably tour again when I’m more chilled out with a show called Fun-gasm or Chillaxmas Eve or something. Bye!