Unbearable

Myself and the girl went to a matinee show at Soho Theatre at the weekend to see Mancub by Scottish theatre company Vanishing Point. The play was an oddball and very moving rites-of-passage drama about a teenage boy who may or may not be able to turn into animals. The play itself was well written and had real heart to it. It was wonderfully acted, too, with most of the show using a three-person cast to portray 20 or so characters with no costume changes or set.

Even better, for a Yorkshireman like myself, the tickets were £5 each and the missus paid! Cheap date city!

I like Soho Theatre a lot. They support new writers and stage a wide variety of stuff from new drama to stand-up comedy to visiting companies. They were also very positive about a script I sent in and, as I am very shallow and easily bought, they will be getting a large donation when I start making serious money from this writing lark.

We also watched the DVD of Hell Boy on Saturday night. Now I confess to being something of a comics fan and I’ll happily crawl over broken glass and ingest my own and anybody else’s urine if the result is that I can get the latest issue of my current comics flavour of the month. But we both fell asleep about halfway through so Hell Boy is either pretty rubbish or we are both getting old and should be tucked up in bed with cocoa by 11pm these days.

Besides my ability to snooze off, of course, another thing that suggests my ever-passing years is my ear and nasal hair. I have noticed that this has been sprouting in ever-larger volumes over the past few years and shows no sign of abating.

At first I tried to take a friendly and even hippy-esque approach to the problem. I figured if it grows naturally then it must be like a plant so if I talked to it nicely it would behave. Sadly the hair just wouldn’t listen so I’ve now taken the scorched earth option and bought a hair trimmer to cut it out on a regular basis.

This works OK but sadly I sometimes miss bits and so spend Tube journeys fiddling with on-the-run offenders that have escaped my unsightly hair pogrom. But this results in the missus grinding her teeth in disgust, giving me that you’ve-just-shat-in-my-favourite-bag look and eventually hitting me.

I try to explain I’m doing it to beautify myself for her so it looks like she isn’t married to a freak but she just sighs. Then she hits me again – and again... I think she quite likes hitting me.

Anyway the upshot of this is not to bother with male grooming. Spend the money on beer or drugs.