I have always loved September... I used to love it for school, new folders, new shoes and a promise of my birthday party being just round the corner. When I decide to have children I will attempt conceive them all some time around New Year... it aids the child immensely in a number of different ways:
1. They are the oldest in their academic year and so benefit from a headstart on looking intelligent until it levels out somewhere around lunchtime.
2. There is boundless enthusiasm for their birthday parties because nobody is bored of loop bags in September. Fuck you May kids. We're tired of your bouncy castles and Burger King crowns.
3. When you are screaming at them in a mother/daughter/son rampage 18 years later you can smugly know in the back of your mind that they only exist because you don't know all the words to Auld Lang Syne like you bragged you did so you banged their Dad to cover the embarrassment.
Now, I love it for the weight of Edinburgh being off for a few months and a faint whiff of some birthday gin being practically poured into a shoe. Edinburgh prep for a comic starts roughly around January/February and runs until the end of August... Most of the year is consumed by the show and the admin and the endless green room conversations. September is free... no thoughts about a new show, no more worrying about numbers or stars. September is mine.
September has always been a month of inevitable change for me. Small inevitable is the kind of change I like. Change that isn't my fault. September heralds changes that will just come no matter how much stomach based anxiety one musters. I like that. It's less pressure.
I was in Year 2 last year? Year 3 now. Can't do anything about that.
It was hot a few weeks ago but now I need a coat? Cool. Putting it on. That's nature.
Poldark is starting? Oh, well, blow me down... can't possibly do anything but watch that, can I?
This year September has a special specialness because for 3 oh so short weeks I get to lord it over the husbandit that, what with his birthday being yesterday, he is in his 30s, while I, whose birthday is not for 22 more days, am still merrily springing about in my 20s. He is a thirty-something while I perch on the precipice of my halcyon deco days. He is wartime while I am... not.*
I turn 30 at the end of this month, which I feel like I ought to have more of an opinion on. Surely, if I was a real comedian, I should be having some kind of breakdown about it? I should be panicking about my achievements, reassessing my life goals and manufacturing a semi-breakdown for next year's Edinburgh show? That, at least, would satisfy the reviewer who saw my current work and wrote "one can only hope that that there’s some life-altering catastrophe waiting just around the corner for Lexx" so that I will have something to talk about in future. Charming.
But I feel fine about it. Obviously, I wish I owned a dog and could still eat haribo morning, noon and night without turning the backs of my legs into malleable organic rain butts, but really... aren't we a bit lying when we say youth is the best part of life?
Upside of being a kid: my mum might take me to WHSmith and get me an awesome new pencil case to start school with.
Upside of being an adult: Amazon Prime Now can deliver as much staionary as I want, to my door, in the next hour and there's nothing saying I have to be very dressed to greet the delivery man.
Upside of being a kid: I can have sleepovers with my friends and eat sweets until midnight.
Upside of being an adult: I have a sleepover every night with my best friend and I only have to stop eating sweets when I get that weird gum ache that makes me feel sad about myself.
Upside of being an kid: the only things I have to worry about are whether my lunch box is cool and the rest of my life.
Upside of being an adult: I don't have a lunchbox and there's considerably less of my life left!
I love September. I love all its creeping differences. May it always stay the same.
*edit this with something that happened in the 1920s once you've got over the fact you have absolutely no knowledge of the 20s. Jarrow march? Wall Street Crash? Shit, maybe the 20s were crap.
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