If Proust had lived in Essex it would have been all about Marmite on toast.
Time to get serious.
Pilgrims coming to the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman please beware of seeking watertight answers to your questions. I know you look on me Alan Measles as your living god and the font of all wisdom but life ain’t that simple. I hate to be the one to tell you but life is meaning less. The only meaning of life is the meaning you give it. This of course sounds tricky and may need a bit of hard work. But the first thing you might learn is that anything worthwhile needs a bit of effort putting into it. There is no right answer, we are all a bit mad, we need to tolerate a measure of un-certainty. What helps is becoming interested in something, is does not matter what, collecting crisp packets, country dancing, Christianity, kinky sex, whatever snags your enthusiasm. Those marvellous enthralling, difficult to grasp peak experiences in life happen while you are wrapped up in something else, hunting out the last in a set, losing yourself in the rhythm, joining a congregation or spending the weekend mummified in duct tape. Sorry to go on so but I want you to be happy (i.e. I’m bored of your moaning).
Grayson bless him has his ‘art’. He hopes the show will inspire people to take their inner lives more seriously. Seeing world culture through his obsessions and perversities might help people to start out on their own personal pilgrimages and find relics of their own selves laid out before them just as he is coming to realise that the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman may be a very elaborate inner self portrait.
Okay I may have tested your tolerance of earnest-ness then I apologise. But in England it is very difficult to deal with a sincere passion.
On a lighter note I met Pinny on Friday the first of my brave stunt doubles. He seemed to be enjoying his first day enthroned in the AM1 greeting passers by on the steps of the Great Court. He said he rather thought he could get used to all the adulation and might miss it terribly when his time was up. I reassured him by saying do not worry the fame thing very rapidly loses its gloss, as Warren Buffet said ‘If you fancy being rich and famous, try just being rich first’.
I encountered my cuddly peer as Grayson and I were on our way to sharing high tea with TV’s Andrew Graham Dixon. Terribly nice chap, really tucked into the Marmite sandwiches always a sure sign of a straight up bloke.
Do come crying to me when your life gets all meaningful.
AM
