The John Robins Vibemail - Issue #27

Current Mood: Hot Sauce Regret

But Hark! Hark! And, I daresay, Lo! What is that upons’t the frosty lawn there?! Can it be? It can’t! IT IS! A Christmas Robins chattering away! And what news does such a fine Christmas Robins bring to the townsfolk? Is it news of the king? Is it good portents of the upcoming harvest? Or is he plugging bloody Cameos and tickets again?…

Ah…

Yes, about that, sorry for all the shenanigans on your lawn just now, I did knock at the door but no one answered. I’m afraid despite extensive progress with the old bum recovery I have perhaps been a little to hasty with the reintroduction of hot sauce(s) to the diet and I’m quite keen to get back into bed so I will keep this as brief as poss.

There is no escaping the fact that a lot of the following is concerned with the brazen hawking of various wares, so if funds are limited and cupboards are bare in the most financially pressurised time of the year please do not hesitate to slam the old door in my face and preserve your £quid for more pressing pantry staples. My favourite things to bulk buy are capers (why oh why are the jars so SMALL?!), soup (I’ll pay full price for canned soup WHEN I’M DEAD) and anchovies (will someone please invent a new way to house anchovies! The flat cans are too leaky to store and the jars ARE TOO THIN AND FIDDLY TO EXTRACT THE ANCHOVIES FROM). Will the torment never end?!

Members Present

His Distinct and Most Venerated Magister to The Lord High Admiralty and Sovereign Realms Sir Johnny John “JR” Robins Jr

Present!

John and Loulie’s New Year’s Eve Eve Stream-A-Doodle-Dandy!

Wait WHAT?! Oh HELL YEAH! The two shiniest buns in the bakery are being delivered piping hot direct to your living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms this New Year’s Eve Eve. John and Loulie present their New Year’s Eve Eve Stream-A-Doodle-Dandy! (patent pending)

For those of you who haven’t taken part in a New Year’s Eve Eve stream before, it’s somewhere between 60-90 mins of pure online content. When we first did it, Elis and I broke the mould and set the trend for lockdown streams by being the first people to broadcast a complex mix of humour, interviews and half an hour of audio feedback which took ages to fix.

Four years on, advances in technology and more expensive headphones mean we’ve got it down to a fine art. This year Elis is absent but taking his place is my favourite New Years Eve Eve fairy Lou Sanders! We’ve already had an online brainstorm session and I have to say Lou is an IDEAS MACHINE. If, however, any of her ideas make it to the actual stream I would be GOBSMACKED. ‘How to stay warm in the credit crunch?’ was one such pearl. However I can’t remember the rest for laughing.

We will be manifesting your hopes and dreams for 2025 so email them in to johnandlou@plosive.co.uk if you want that hunk to finally darken your door / your friend to BACS you £10Quid / world peace.

Join us at 8pm on Monday 30th December by purchasing a ticket from my Bandcamp page here. Tickets are £8 and a pound from each goes to the fantastic charity Standing Together Against Domestic Abuse.

Please note, you can watch on demand for up to 48 hours after the stream ends, but in order to do this you must buy a ticket before the show. Tickets will not be available for purchase after the event!

Cameo-Ho-Ho

Despite currently being limited to the amount of live comedy I can perform in the regions (zero, thanks to the old bum). I am ready, willing and able to sit for between two to four mins (once seven and a half mins) to record Christmas greetings, congratulations, birthday wishes, pep talks, wisdom transfers and good luck bonanzas to your nearest and dearest via digital messaging platform Cameo. This is another invention born out of the mother of necessity during lockdown. I genuinely love doing them and am so glad they are able to add a little slice of Robins to your special occasion / unwanted relationship advice on her special day.

If you don’t believe me just read my reviews which feature phrases like “genuinely touched”, “awesome video” and “unplanned coughing fit”.

Please note I’m not available in the app because Apple charge you an extra %25 as an ‘in app purchase’ which is pretty roguish, so book me direct from the website here www.cameo.com/johnrobins.

Please also note that Cameo gives a seven day window to record, so if you request 2 or 3 days before the big day I may not get it to you in time. I hate lateness and will do my utmost but it’s just not possible to guarantee delivery in under a week. If you are #DespoToImpressbo there is the option for 24hr delivery for a few extra £quid / $dollars. This is especially relevant at this time of year as, despite my petition for the UK government to delay Christmas to accommodate my Cameo schedule, they refuse to see sense. So if your message is for Christmas please don’t leave it til Christmas Eve or even Christmas Eve Eve as I will be busy wrapping presents very badly and swearing at myself. And no one wants to see that.

That Feels Significant: LIVE!

Thank You to everyone who bought tickets to what many in the press are calling the most significant cultural event of 2025! Here are the dates again

Shows that have sold out are Norwich, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Birmingham. Manchester and London are very close to selling out and may have done by the time you read this. Remember to check both Ticketmaster’s allocation (available here) and individual venue websites which are all listed at elisandjohnmerch.com. Very limited holds will be released closer to the dates but we’re talking literally 10-20 tickets per show depending on how many friends / lovers / Mastermans want to nab a place on the guest list. Please try to resist the temptation to contact Elis and I directly for tickets, unless, of course, you are an existing friend or lover or Masterman.

HOWL

If you’re struggling to think of the perfect gift this Christmas, then why not get someone the greatest gift of all - an audio recording of a troubled man grappling with alcoholism and sobriety. Happy Christmas Grandma! If this fits the bill then 101 mins of Mp4ection (Mp4 Perfection) await. You can even listen to the introduction here as a little treat. The link to buy is johnrobins.bandcamp.com

A few people have asked if Howl is available to watch anywhere. I’m afraid it’s not, nor ever will be! There are three main reasons for this, firstly I like audio as a way of consuming comedy. I think it’s really intimate and better replicates the experience of being at the show than loads of jump-cuts making it look like you’re watching from seven different rows and keep hopping about between them. I was in the edit for The Darkness Of Robins (still not available / still don’t own it) and it was an absolute nightmare to get it looking less like an editing world record attempt and more like a comedy show, though I think we (by we I mean a much more talented man that I watched tapping various keys) did a decent job. Some comedians have come up with creative ways to film and edit stand up making it feel more akin to being there in the room, Daniel Kitson, James Acaster and Captain Grumpy’s Comedy Vehicle are some good examples.

Secondly, it took me so long to pluck up the courage to listen back to it that if I had given my inner critic the added ammunition of MY FACE AND BODY to deal with I very much doubt it would ever have seen the light of day.

Finally, and perhaps most compellingly, when I looked in to the prospect of filming it I was quoted forty grand.

I Am Grateful

I thought I’d end on a nice note. After a reassuring chat with a surgeon where he put various things up my bum and declared it well on the way to being one of the BEST BUMS IN EUROPE I am hopefully coming towards the end of what has been an unexpectedly long and painful period. Far longer and more painful THAN THE WEBSITE SUGGESTED TO BE FAIR. But anyway, let’s not add the second arrow of suing under The Trade Descriptions Act to the more pressing first arrow of bum pain.

If you haven’t heard me wang on about it before, the second arrow is a Buddhist parable where the Buddha says to a student

In life, we can’t always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. This second arrow is optional.

One thing I’ve learned is that removing second arrows (and third and forth and fifth tbf) is absolutely critical to maintaining good mental health when in the storm of adversity. This is especially true when we’re ill, in pain, people let us down or things don’t go according to plan. As a (perhaps less likely) saying might go

The man in excruciating bum pain is happier than the man in excruciating bum pain who’s annoyed that the surgeon hasn’t replied to his email yet

No doubt this has been expressed in lots of ways over the centuries, not least in The Serenity Prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous. I can’t change the first arrow, I can change the second.

Something I have found very useful in the arrow removal process is gratitude. I have mentioned recently on air with Elis (listen on BBC sounds here) that every night I list ten things I am grateful for before I go to sleep. I do it in the mornings too if I wake up feeling glum, or begin the day speaking to myself in a negative way. And increasingly I will jump to doing it in moments of frustration or despair throughout the day. By keeping this up I have found it not only to become a more automatic response to adversity, but it slowly grows into lifting my general mood somewhat. It’s like there’s a base layer of gratitude forming beneath my feet.

I went to see my favourite musician Bonnie “Prince” Billy last week, a rare outing in an otherwise pretty barren and isolated recovery.

(If you’re interested I would recommend his albums Viva Last Blues, Joya, Arise Therefore, I See A Darkness, Ease Down The Road, Lost Blues and Other Songs, The Wondershow Of The World, Superwolf, The Letting Go)

I’ve seen him about twenty times in my life but never have I seen him talk quite so much on stage as he did at Rough Trade East. He spoke about suffering and it effected me deeply. I won’t be able to do justice to his words here, but, in short, he said how people, Christians specifically I imagine - but I guess all of us in a broader cultural sense - place a lot of importance on the story of a man taking on our suffering. An act of sacrifice for our salvation.

And yet, he continued, we should be mindful that this very act is happening all over the world right now. In a very real way people in the most diabolical situations are taking on our suffering.

He suggested that we owe it to those who are suffering in the world to enjoy the things that they would wish for themselves - a bed, a hot bath, a night out, a meal. These are not unreasonable demands, they are human rights and necessities, which many go without. I want to distinguish this from the more aggressive direction to ‘cheer up because other people have it worse’, I don’t find that works at all. But more an invocation to use gratitude as a small moment of recognition, a form of tribute to those who suffer so that we might have comfort.

Have you ever lambasted yourself for “wasting a day lounging around doing nothing?”. I say have your day of scrolling or thinking or browsing and use it as you like! Comfort is a great luxury, we should allow ourselves to enjoy it. As I was howling away in and around the toilet for some time, I was able to remove an arrow or two by being mindful of the people who work for water companies, going down sewers and pipes and out in the rain fixing leaks so that I could have my hot bath, and ensuring that, if going to the loo was going to register a 9.5 on the pain scale, at least I didn’t have to be around the product of that pain for very long.

After the show someone asked if I would like to meet Bonnie “Prince” Billy. I am grateful for that. We spoke for ten minutes or so and he asked about my work. I am grateful for that. He signed my posters and gave me a cookie. I am grateful for that. With all of this in mind, and thinking about how his music has meant so much to me for twenty five years, I was overcome to get home and find he had signed my poster “John, I am grateful”.

I am immensely grateful to have your support for whatever projects of mine that you enjoy. It means a great deal.

I hope your Christmases provide some moments of comfort. I hope that, if you find Christmas a tricky time, if families are complex or annoying or absent in any way, that you are able to carve out a small space just for you. If the day itself is a frustration of other peoples habits and demands, or a logistical ball-ache, then do not feel shy of creating a Christmas moment all of your own. It can be any time you like, even in the barren swathes of January! And here’s to keeping going in 2025.

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