Child of Confusion.

Sometimes one of my Comedy shows will get a review written by one or other journalist with one or other sense of humor, or even by journalists without a sense of humor but a sense of duty, this being to warn their readers of any form of humor which doesn’t coincide with the definition humor that they had searched for on google specially for this occasion.

One such journalist once described me as a ‘Confused Comedian’, ‘jumping from topic to topic, only to return to the main topic where he started out’. He obviously meant ‘Confusing’ instead of ‘Confused’, a difference which would say more about him than me, but I digress.

To be honest, I am confused, there, I said it. I have always been confused, confused about most things, I think my birth sign was a question mark followed by an exclamation mark or just a confused emoji. 

It all started more or less at the beginning, when I first realised that not all families are constructed like ours. The awakening to the confusion surrounding me was the day in primary school when we were asked to draw our family tree as homework, the Teacher said ‘keep it simple, just include your Grandparents, your parents and your siblings’. 

That evening I sat at the kitchen table with a sheet of paper, the corners of which were held down with a bottle of ketchup, a tin of beans, a can of cider and my Mothers copy of ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover’. It was the first time that Mum and Dad actually helped me with my homework, it was also the last, in retrospect I think they just wanted to make sure that I got their side of the confusing story which was about to unfold. 

It turned out that not all of my brothers and sisters were my brothers and sisters, some were just half brothers and half sisters, some were half- on my Mothers side, some on my Dads. There were also three sisters who were actual fully blown sisters, I was the first full child of both mum and Dad, and yet I was number 10 on the scale of madness which was the Williams family who lived at nr 31. 

So there were more grandparents and siblings on my Family tree than on any other Family tree in my class at primary school. In fact the whole thing looked more like a hedge than a tree,  a hedge overgrown with weeds, and full of empty beer cans, unused condoms and broken dreams.

And so the confusion begun, and since then it has been a companion on life’s road, and the reason I approach everything life throws at me with a bag of salt and an ounce or two of disbelief. 

‘Welcome to my world’ (Jim Reeves, my Mums favourite singer).