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Podcasts, there are millions of them. Some might say too many. I have one already.
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I don't have any, because there are enough. Politics, business, sport, you name it, there's a podcast about it, and they all ask the big questions and cover the hot topics of the day.
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But nobody is covering the most important topic of all. Why is that? Are they scared?
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Too afraid of being censored by the man? Possibly, but not us. We're here to ask the only question that matters.
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We try and say it at the same time, Max. What did you do yesterday?
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What did you do yesterday? That's it. All we're interested in is what the guests got up to yesterday, nothing more.
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Day before yesterday, Max? Nope. The greatest and most interesting day of your life? Unless it was yesterday, we don't want to know about it.
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I'm Max Rushden. And I'm David O'Doherty. Welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday? Hello and welcome to episode, season two, episode seven of What Did You Do Yesterday?
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I'm Max Rushden. In some tragic news, David and I have not managed to sync up our diaries to record the little intro bit before we do the Mark Watson What Did You Do Yesterday episode.
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I appreciate for the O'Doherty stans, they may just stop listening right now. But for those of you that can bear for this episode, to only be introduced by me, it is a good one.
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Mark Watson. You know Mark Watson. He's in all of the things. He's in all of the shows that you've seen over the years.
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I imagine he's plugging a tour. I should check that. Hang on. Excuse the pause.
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Please remain on the line as we value your call. Ah, yeah. Yeah. He is doing, let me see, the Soho Theatre soon.
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He's doing the Melbourne Comedy Festival. Oh, good. I'll have a cup of tea with him.
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He wrote a book called Mortification, a kind of memoir, which is on Kindle for 99p.
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So do all of those things. And here is what he did yesterday. Mark Watson, welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday?
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Thanks very much, Max and David, for having me. Welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday, Mark Watkins, as I insist on misnaming you.
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Yeah, you've been doing that for about 15 years, I think. Yeah, I think it's one of those jokes that was never funny in the first place.
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And so I've just stuck with it in the hope that maybe on the 20th anniversary, you might smile slightly when I call you Mark Watkins.
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I think maybe the way to look at it is it never really was a joke, but because you've stuck with it for so long, it is at least a kind of friendly tradition.
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So it serves a purpose of a different kind. It's reassuring, even if it's not funny, in the way that an old jumper might be, I guess.
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I mean, I don't want to get off on the wrong foot, David, but I didn't find it funny.
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First, I just thought, what are you doing? It was my first thought. So definitely there's a marketing problem with the joke.
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It doesn't seem like a joke. It's too close to being my actual name to be sort of – it's not exactly surreal.
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But as I say, it's definitely got something, because every time he calls me Watkins, I feel something.
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Yeah, a sort of fake satisfaction that none of us has died yet, whatever it is.
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Thanks, Mark Watkins. Okay, let's get down to the serious business, Mark Watkins. Yeah. No, I can't do that.
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It doesn't sound right when you do it, no. Doc is the only person that's ever done an inverted commas joke.
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Yeah, yeah. No, to me, Mark Watkins sounds like someone who played for Shrewsbury, 532 games.
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Honestly. One club man, a hero to that town. And probably is. If you were to Google Mark Watkins, you will find a lower league football, a journeyman footballer, almost for certain.
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The other one of those that I have that has never been funny, particularly is when I do gigs with Alex Horne's band, the Horne section, when I sit down in the chair, I say,
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good evening, Szechuan, like instead of section, because Szechuan sounds a bit, and then I'd say, let's go to walk.
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And again, it's never got anything, but maybe one day. And again, it's, it's not going to get anything.
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Cause there's sort of, it doesn't sit. You're more of a music guy, I suppose.
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The closest I've got is Mark Watkins who played for Stoke, Aston Villa, San Diego and Crystal Palace, Northampton, Stoke, crew staff at Tunstall Park, born 1880 and he died in 1942.
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That explains the Tunstall Park then, which now I have got a Mark Watkins here, but he played just one game at senior level for Cumbrian Town and to find his stats, I've had to go onto a website,
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which is now flashing up all sorts of adverts. So that window is getting closed again.
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When footballers have done so little, they go to the dark web. I don't know, that's where you find out about them.
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A footballer with such a minimal career that I risk being arrested if I look him up any further.
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Let's cut to the chase here. What time did you wake up yesterday, Mark? Seven o'clock, 7am Max, because it was one of the days I have to take my children to school and those days begin, well, seven o'clock
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alarm and then 7.15 is when I have to actually get up. But I've got a kind of, and people differ in this regard, I'm not someone that can hear the alarm and immediately spring out of bed and I don't really understand people who can do that.
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So 15 minutes is the minimum interval required between an alarm going off and actually getting up.
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And of course, huge danger that you'd go back to sleep in that period. I readily believe there are people who can hear the alarm and then, people will tell you it's a bit like ripping the plaster off.
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As soon as you hear the alarm, you just, you move. And that probably is true, but in 45 years, I've not yet been able to act like that.
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You say that, Sam Campbell, the moment the alarm goes off, it's a race to get sunlight on his face.
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He genuinely goes straight for it. You can just imagine Campbell sort of sticking his face immediately out of the window or a skylight or whatever bullshit he's got in his house.
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With apologies to all our listeners with skylights. Yeah, this podcast is brought to you by skylights.
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This would be a bad time to find out that we've got a sponsor. Well, in those 15 minutes, basically, and some days this goes better than others, but I like to try and, and I read this in a book by Derren Brown,
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but actually it's something I was already doing. I like to try and memorise 25,000 people's phone numbers.
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Basically what I do in those 15 minutes, ideally is just take stock of what, of the horrors ahead.
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I basically like to, I have this kind of superstition that if I get out, actually it's not exactly a superstition.
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If I get out of bed without having thought at all about what is expected of me that day, I feel as if I'm sort of just walking blindfolded into it.
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So in theory, that 15 minutes is me just calmly looking ahead to what I'm going to do over the next few hours and so on. In reality, depends on the, on the day.
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This morning was a day like that because I don't have too many things to worry about today, but yesterday, which is when we're talking about, I spent most of that 15 minutes thinking different versions of, oh Christ.
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And then the, the clause after that was just a thing that I had to worry about.
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Mark Watkins, are you catastrophizing? Are you imagining terrible things driving into the canal? You know what I mean? Things like this, ice cream exploding.
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The time for that is normally the old, the three to 4am slot. I find that's when I get a lot of my catastrophizing down.
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I don't think I'm alone in finding that an excellent time to catastrophize because there should be a radio show at 3am.
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So I just called catastrophizing. With two exclamation marks, yeah. Someone just rolling through all the terrible things that might happen for insomniacs to empathize with.
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Because I've sometimes been getting back from a gig very late and you get those, there's those radio stations that are like, and we're just seeing you through the hours from midnight to two and it's all quite like soothing and they're your buddy.
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At 3am, a radio station should kick in where someone goes, shh, Jesus, fuck. For the next hour, we're going to think about all of the things that have worried you for the past 20 years and come to no useful conclusions or resolutions.
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I think what's crucial is like for many years, I, in fact, really as long as I can remember, I've been a guy that wakes up for a wee somewhere between 3 and 5am and it is very important to try to execute that in a state
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of almost completely still asleep-ness. If you allow yourself to, you've got to be awake enough to pull off the wee satisfactorily, obviously.
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But in that window, if you start, if you start looking at your phone or doing anything, then catastrophe follows.
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I've got quite good at it. Like my phone is always off at night. It would take a bit of an effort for me to enable it.
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My partner will immediately start reading stuff on the phone or will start engaging with the world again if she wakes up at night and that is a recipe then for not getting back to sleep in my opinion.
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You do wonder, maybe those, you know the CEOs who get up at 3am and allegedly it's there to get their day running.
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It's possible. It's possible just so they can avoid worrying about whether there's going to be scorpions in the bananas that they've bought downstairs.
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100%. All these, with the best will in the world, all these pricks that you read a day in the life and the day starts at half past four with meditation.
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All they mean is I wake up at 4.30 in a cold sweat and I can't get back to sleep so I'm going to pass it off as meditation.
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I've got a studio at the bottom of my garden because I'm a billionaire CEO but it doesn't change the fact that I'm still worrying at half past four in the morning, it's just I've managed to couch it as a daily meditation
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when everyone else has it for what it is, catastrophizing. For a few months I did the overnight show on BBC London Radio and it's quite an odd show and on Tuesday nights the keyboard player from the cutting crew came in with a Casio keyboard and played songs
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but never played I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight. The cutting crew song that we can all name.
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Yeah, he was a really nice bloke. Anyway, one night there was an astrologer who came in and did an hour.
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An hour? Yeah, an hour. He was an astrologer. Honestly, she got so many phone calls, like literally the switchboard and someone rang up, I can't remember who it was, it was like a regular listener, someone who listened the whole show
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every night and was like, look, I work in finance, you know, my node is in Pluto and I'm a Sagittarius and I just feel that my career isn't going as well as it can.
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And just before Victoria the astrologer spoke, I said, look, I'm not here to lose listeners but I think the fact that you're awake between two and six.
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Every morning. Tells its own story. Might be impacting your career. It could be as important as the node situation.
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Possibly. I think one of my novels is about a guy that hosts that slot of a radio.
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I think that the sort of midnight to 4am, the relationship between people presenting those shows and the listeners is very, very interesting and distinctive.
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It's not quite like any other radio show. The sort of people that religiously listen at that time of night, I think they do form very intense attachments to the times I've been on.
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I've occasionally been on those shows as a guest. The stuff you see come in is different in character from people that are up at a normal time, shall we say.
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Yeah, okay. You've had your 15 minutes of lying there. Where are you up and where are you?
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Waking the kids up? What's happening? My son has to leave the house to go to the bus stop earlier than, well, my daughter's still little enough I have to take her to school.
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The son merely needs to be taken to the bus stop, but these are two separate operations.
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So there's this two-part waking up of the children, which parents listening will be familiar with.
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Also, waking my son. My son's nearly 15 and it is unfortunately a process of, well, waking him up, then sort of reminding him.
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He also likes to serve this cooling off period where he's awake but not doing anything.
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But in his case, that period can stretch to quite a long time, hours. And then there's a mystery bit where he's awake, he's even dressed, and you've still got a 15-minute margin for error to get to the bus stop.
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And at that point, the bookies, the in-play odds are always looking good for you getting to the bus stop.
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But somehow that 15 or 20 minutes disappears. It's not easy to say, he's not like hiding in the bathroom.
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He's in plain sight. It's some sort of not quite a shredding his cat thing, but you can go back to his room as many times as you want and say,
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are you ready? We're going to go now. He will say, yes, I am ready any minute now.
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But somehow he remains in a sort of suspended state for that time and the clock is still ticking.
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So basically what I'm saying is nearly always late. And on top of that, these are London buses.
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And so yesterday we fell foul of this thing where even if you are at the bus stop on time, the bus just comes, the driver takes a look out the window and says, I think so.
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And on it goes merrily. Yeah, I remember so many memories of the 166 that would just go past and the drivers don't stop for no one, don't go nowhere, just fuck off, I'm off.
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There's no feeling of futility. There's no feeling that you're wasting your life quite like standing at a bus stop for 15 minutes, seeing the bus, the whites of the bus driver's eyes and then seeing the fucker drive off again without absolutely any interaction.
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And unfortunately, and we've only recently moved, it's not like there are many backup buses.
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If we miss that bus, then we're pretty much screwed. So fine, we'll be there on time, but it's not a situation you get in.
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A plane doesn't sort of get halfway through boarding and then say, we're just going to go now, actually, that'll do.
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Or like the trains are unreliable and they may be crowded, but the train will at least give you a chance to get on.
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A bus is one of the only things where you can have done, everything right, and still you're simply not on it.
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I don't know. The last time I got the ferry from Hollyhead in Wales to Dublin.
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Now a ferry is an interesting one. I arrived in plenty of time and they were like, no, it went early.
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I felt like a real landlubber. And I've never had that feeling before, but they were like, yeah, tides were wrong.
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So I think they might even have said she went early today. Like I was just supposed to be like, oh, I'm stuck here until the spring.
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You're really conscious of how little you know about stuff like shipping when they say things like the tides.
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And you're just like, right, but sorry, the internet did inform me. I can show you here a screenshot, which tells you that we can't argue with Poseidon himself.
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I have a question, Mark Watkins. And that is, is this a time in trying to motivate, particularly a 15 year old where maybe the, the fact that you use your beautiful brain to think of these ideas,
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to do shows and to write books. Maybe if you had more of a conventional job, you would be able to be like, listen, son, I've got to go down there and sell fish in the market in 20 minutes.
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I don't need you delaying anything. Do you know what I mean? And it is for that reason that I've got an interview after this with a fishmonger actually, because enough's enough. It's time for me to go nine to five.
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Yeah. Well, they're not even nine to five, are they? God knows what time you start if you're a fish man.
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You've got to go to those markets. You're listening to catastrophe on the radio. You're listening to panic when you get up.
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All the people listening to that are about to go to a fish market. You are right though, David.
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For sure, if I would be in a stronger bargaining position, hustling him and say, come on, come on, everyone's got to go to work.
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Everyone's got to go to school. Were he not aware that I'm likely just going back to my house to sit at a computer?
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Yeah. And I suppose that is a generational thing. Not all, but most of our parents generation were able to say, I am going to the office. You must go to school.
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Now it is more, I am going to the studio at the bottom of my garden, but you still must go to school.
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Both my kids and my partner's kid have at some point voiced this thing of like, but it's not fair. You do get to stay at home.
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And of course you then have to run them through the many, many ways in which being an adult is inferior to being a child, including the proximity of death.
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But ironically, if I get this fishmonger job, I won't be able to get him to school at all unless he comes at 5am. So it's difficult.
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Okay. So on yesterday, what happened with the bus? Did you get the bus? Did the bus go by? What was the bus situation?
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No, the bus went sailing past and I then had to go back to the house, scoop up my daughter and get an Uber, which was now the only means of getting both of them to school on time,
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other than if I went back in time and learned to drive, which I'm not going to do.
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So I understand that every time I complain about public transport, a good counter argument would be, but you're 45 nil and you can't drive a car.
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That is going through my brain right now, I must say. Yeah. But the thing is, and this is I think an unbeatable counter argument from me, I don't want to learn to drive a car and I don't want to drive a car or have a car.
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And also I've got more high-minded stuff about how we should all be using public transport more and infrastructure should be rigged to make us do that.
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But basically I can't drive. So I'm angry when things don't work out on the train.
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Can I just ask, did you say I'm not going to drive a car at the same time that David started calling you Mark Watkins and you were both so stubborn with these two things that don't really work that you were just going to persevere with them through
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life? I mean, I must say the driving one is probably has a bigger material impact on you than Mark Watkins one.
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Yeah. Dottles isn't sitting there in the middle of a tour thinking, well, I might not make it to my own show here because I keep calling that man Mark Watkins. Whereas I,
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David isn't thinking if only I hadn't called that man Watkins so many times, I'd be able to get to Devon more easily.
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So basically not driving has turned into a 25 year long commitment to the bit for me at enormous cost.
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Mark Watkins, this is about yesterday. So nothing else concerns us, but you could have learned to drive.
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I remember once trying to teach you how to ride a bike because you can't cycle either.
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Oh no, I don't believe in any form of transport. Can you scoot? Can you roller skate?
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Have you got a pair of rollerblades? No, I have the legs that God gave me.
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And actually we may have to come onto this if we're talking about yesterday. I have currently got, I'm recovering from a foot injury, but normally I am quite a good runner and I do a fair bit of running and
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people assume I've talked about this on stage. They assume it's for exercise. And in a sense it is, but I've like a sort of prehistoric creature.
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I've evolved to be a good runner because literally the only way that I can transport myself around cities.
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It's not unknown for me to arrive at an appointment in running gear, having, Ivo Graham also famously does this, but he's quicker than me and younger.
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But I've been known to like turn up for like, last year I recorded a podcast all in running gear.
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Cause the only way I could reliably get there was just to sort of sprint there for 45 minutes.
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Again, you can look at these as enjoyable quirks or the red flags of a man who hasn't really got his life in good order.
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It's the fact that Mark only travels by two methods, either running or the other thing is, you know, it's a sort of like a buggy that goes on train tracks where someone is on each side.
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Yeah. But it's frustratingly hard to flag one of those down. Uber don't offer it.
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And if Laurel or Hardy aren't around. That's the other problem. Unless you have a slapstick duo to hand you, you can't get anywhere.
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Even if you have got one of those things. Right. So we're in the Uber.
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This is exciting. Do you sit in the front then? I presume. Do you talk to the driver?
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What's the vibe? No, you might think I sit in the front, but we've actually got a system.
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And again, this is, I suppose, once again, a sign of someone that gets stuck in a particular groove.
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Years ago. You get in the boot. Again, the boot. I didn't mention this, but if I do have to go in a car, I must have sensory deprivation at all times.
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I'm more panicked about the roads. Not being a driver, you see, I don't understand the codes.
20:11 - 20:20
No, I, every time I'm in a taxi with my children, we sit three across the back seat and I'm in the middle, which is the least comfortable place for the person with the longest legs to be.
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And that's because four or five years ago, when the kids were, roughly nine and four or five respectively, they'd fight and bicker and stuff.
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And it used to drive me around the bend. And so the only way I could stop it was to just put myself in between them.
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And now the children are more, on the whole, reasonable and they don't, they certainly don't physically fight like they used to.
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But again, over time, these systems solidify. So now without even talking about it, we just know I'm going to get in between the children as if they still were scrapping toddlers instead of one of them almost being old enough to be a fishmonger himself.
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This is a long and expensive, journey I would imagine to go to two schools in an Uber.
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It should not have been, but it is, of course at that time of day, there's quite a bit of traffic and yeah, the children's schools, although they're both in the same area,
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they are delightfully far apart. It's as if it's been planned for some TV show like The Amazing Race.
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The kids' schools couldn't be more disadvantageously planned. This is only until next year when my daughter goes to hopefully a marginally better place to go.
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But for these couple of years, it's been a ridiculous trip really between them. There is a pub, which is roughly perfectly situated between the two of them.
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So for pickups these days, I get the smaller kid, place myself in the pub and the older kid joins me there.
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And that system has worked so well for us that he's now, and you don't often say this about, and perhaps shouldn't say it about a 15 year old, but he's now seen as a regular by the pub.
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He gets there before me sometimes and he's already got his usual, which is a diet Coke and a plate of chips.
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Pickups are actually quite pleasant in that regard, because once you've got a kid old enough to say, I'll meet you in the pub, your lot as a parent improves considerably.
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But drop-offs at school, will always be for everyone, regardless of method, a nightmare. Can I ask you, have you had any breakfast by this stage?
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You've had anything to drink, anything to consume, anything? I've had one coffee, which these days is decaffeinated.
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I've pretty much completely stopped having caffeine because, although I may come across as quite a chilled individual, I've actually started to notice that.
22:15 - 22:22
And in fact, one of the mornings that made me think this was with you, Max, I went on that football TV show in Melbourne with you.
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Oh yeah. And what was that lovely man, tall man's name? Ed Cavalli. Yes, Ed.
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I'd got up pretty early to do that though. And I think, oh, that's right.
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I was doing an online thing that I used to do that time called The House.
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So I'd been up since like 6am, then came straight to you, had a coffee.
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I must've had two or three coffees, not that much, and certainly not that much in Melbourne terms, but a bit unusual for me.
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And I was walking through Dockland's area of Melbourne afterwards, and just had this sense that, hard to describe unless people, you'll sort of know the feeling if you have over-caffeinated yourself.
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I just had this, you couldn't even quite call it panic, just a sort of sense that I was not really living my own life anymore.
23:03 - 23:10
Something was badly wrong. And I've had a really nice time on your show. And in fact, I've had a really nice morning.
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I remember walking to the studio, being quite blissed out, thinking I love Melbourne. I've had real fun doing this online thing.
23:17 - 23:21
But then at the studio, I was offered what turned out to be the fatal coffee.
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Still felt very good doing the TV show, but then, at some point, so my relationship with caffeine basically is, and I think it's true for a lot of people, nice up to a certain point,
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but then really bad news after that point. So I've sort of worked out that people sneer at the idea of decaffeinated coffee, but there's a big question mark about really whether I like coffee in the first place.
23:44 - 23:49
I'm just doing it because drinking coffee is sort of what you do. So it sort of doesn't matter whether it's nice or not.
23:49 - 23:59
I got into trouble in an early episode of this podcast by asking if anyone really liked tea, in a similar way, or do they enjoy the ceremonial aspect?
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Also the let's take a break from work and have a cup of tea, et cetera.
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But I did have a delicious cup of tea recently, Mark. So I've gone back on that.
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You can have a nice cup of tea, but I also have got into trouble for this.
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I once mouthed off in a podcast about, well, what I don't like is the fetishization of tea.
24:16 - 24:25
You know, if you're online, I follow a lot of writers, people in the arts, generally self-employed people, almost all of like what was book Twitter.
24:25 - 24:33
Now Blue Sky is a delightful place to be. But there is this thing of people going, oh, the writing's going well today on my ninth cup of tea, lol.
24:33 - 24:39
Or this like strand of wisdom where it's like, oh, I thought the world was ending.
24:39 - 24:43
Then I remembered I just needed a cuppa. Like people's relationship with tea is weird.
24:43 - 24:48
People talk about it like your life can have come apart at the seams and all you need is to boil the kettle.
24:48 - 24:59
And people also, writers or like self-employed artistic people do have this irritating tendency to be like, well, today's novel has been powered by PG tips.
24:59 - 25:05
You're like, just sit and write your book, you prick. Have a cup of tea by all means, but don't mistake that for a newsflash.
25:05 - 25:10
Well, you should start saying this. You could be the first bad boy on blue sky.
25:10 - 25:15
Just, hey, assholes, if anyone mentions a tea, I'm going to come over and wedgie you.
25:15 - 25:20
Obviously, the atmosphere on blue sky is lovely, but I've started seeing unacceptably twee posts.
25:20 - 25:26
But exactly, I, of all people, a person whose reputation I have rests partly on being a nice guy.
25:26 - 25:30
I can't be the person that shows up on blue sky and goes, everyone is a bit fucking wet here, aren't they?
25:30 - 25:44
Yes, tea is nice. Yes, books are great. Yes, libraries are valuable. Come on. I mean, we are on there, but you just wait till, I mean, this whole podcast is a plan we're going to launch.
25:44 - 25:50
What did you do yesterday? Coin a new crypto. And then we're going to start pushing it really hard on there.
25:50 - 25:55
Yeah, your podcast is yesterday. Your coin is tomorrow. Or you can imagine some shit like that.
25:55 - 26:03
Now, Mark, it gets to this stage quite often in the podcast where we're half an hour in, and I don't believe it's 8 o'clock.
26:03 - 26:09
Or maybe it's half 8, and so. I've listened to a couple of episodes, and at early doors, you're thinking, well, they're not getting all the way through the day here.
26:09 - 26:14
And I was really, I knew this would be one of those, I must say.
26:14 - 26:20
But that's not a criticism. It's not a criticism, Mark. I'm excited that this could be our first ever two-hour episode.
26:20 - 26:24
I meant to be on another thing in 15 minutes, and those people have got to be very, very worried now.
26:24 - 26:29
I am now. I'm typing a message now to them, in fact, yeah. Oh, actually, do you have an out time?
26:29 - 26:34
Like, is it 15 minutes or what? It was 11, but I didn't know that. That has been sprung on me.
26:34 - 26:37
I've just received it. So I'm going to say to my agent, that is not possible.
26:37 - 26:41
Unless we go through the rest of it with me literally just listing nine events.
26:41 - 26:49
No. Tell them, Mark, we will be done at 11.15. Give us 11.20, we will be done.
26:49 - 26:53
David, there's no way. They'll give us a goal. There's no way. It's a goal, but it's never going to happen.
26:53 - 26:57
I'll say 11.15, and then it's something. It's something to aspire to, and I can always be slightly late for that.
26:57 - 27:02
Okay, so you've dropped most of the kids off. Do you stay in the Uber and just go all the way home in the Uber?
27:02 - 27:11
Well, that would make sense. But yesterday, I did not do that because of a sort of stubbornness, because of this feeling of like, it's already stupid.
27:11 - 27:19
I've had to get an Uber. So in a way, I cut my nose off to spite my face by getting out of the Uber and then walking, not running on this occasion.
27:19 - 27:25
Actually, we may as well get onto this. I've been on an enforced layoff from running.
27:25 - 27:31
And from playing squash, the new love of my middle-aged life, because I did an Achilles tendon.
27:31 - 27:36
But the doctor said, basically, don't do anything much for six weeks. And I don't know, you know me a bit.
27:36 - 27:41
I'm not really not doing anything much type of person. So I've resented that advice.
27:41 - 27:47
But I have at least not done any hard exercise or sport. But yesterday, it was a fortunate day to be asked to do this podcast, really.
27:47 - 27:50
Yesterday, I went back onto the squash court for the first time in six weeks.
27:50 - 27:57
I basically passed myself fit. In football terms, you'd say, we're still at the stage, where it would say the game comes too soon for Watson.
27:57 - 28:04
If I was a footballer in the press conference, the manager would say something like, we will check Watson, but it does not look good.
28:04 - 28:07
But I just had enough. My mate asked me to play and I caved in.
28:07 - 28:11
So that's what I did. Walked home from this drop off and then went to play squash.
28:11 - 28:22
Oh, wow. In having this Achilles accident, if I was to compare you to anyone from history, it would be Achilles himself, who famously had an Achilles problem.
28:22 - 28:28
It turns out my Achilles heel is, is a literal problem, yeah. And he also couldn't drive, famously.
28:28 - 28:36
No, and it wrecked his squash career also. And also, before it happened to him, he had no way of describing.
28:36 - 28:42
He had to go to the GP and he was pointing directly at it. And he's just like, it's this, whatever that thing's called.
28:42 - 28:46
The GP would say, unfortunately, there simply isn't, we haven't devised a name for that part of him, that's me, yeah.
28:46 - 28:51
It will need someone to really bugger it before we can do that. So who are you playing squash against?
28:51 - 28:56
I was going to make an ill-advised joke along the same lines about Parkinson's disease, but you can guess what the joke would have been.
28:56 - 29:00
I'm not going to do it anyway. Well, so I've got a mate who got me into squash.
29:00 - 29:09
And we're only talking about last year, 18 months ago. I'm fully obsessed with squash these days, but 18 months ago I'd never played in my life, or at least not properly.
29:09 - 29:17
Amazing game, isn't it? Fantastic, yeah. Only problem is, absolutely wrecks your body permanently. Tim Key, known to many listeners of this podcast, used to play.
29:17 - 29:22
He hurt his shoulder doing it and just drew a line under it forever, I think.
29:22 - 29:28
Squash is bad enough for your body that people, that permanently retire after one game sometimes.
29:28 - 29:33
But me, I love it. But my history with it is my friend, obviously it's better than me because he introduced me to it.
29:33 - 29:40
I just stood in for a partner who dropped out, played once, was hooked, got addicted, then started playing capacitively with this friend.
29:40 - 29:48
Obviously very, very rarely beat him because he is a proper player. I went from thinking, I'm not bad at this.
29:48 - 29:58
This is a fun new hobby, to within three months being furious, coming home and saying things like, I'm getting done over on my backhand side, I'm not hitting the corners, talking gibberish.
29:58 - 30:03
Eventually my partner tired of this and for a present, she got me a one-off squash coaching session.
30:03 - 30:07
At this point, you know, you've gone mad. With Janga Khan, it must have been.
30:07 - 30:17
With former world champion Janga Khan. No, with a man in his 60s called Chris, who wears an Adidas track suit from that era, from when squash was more popular.
30:17 - 30:24
Good, good. Chris Tarrant. Chris Tarrant, surprisingly, yeah. Every time he hit the ball, hit it as if there was a million pounds on it.
30:25 - 30:30
He's not really a squash coach, he's more of a sort of energy coach. And this, again, is a slippery slope.
30:30 - 30:36
The guy coached me for, well, I did one coaching session. He encouraged me to sign up for six more sessions with a group, also learning squash.
30:36 - 30:43
That led to me enrolling in a squash league. And before you know it, you're the sort of guy that in your 20s, you would scarcely have believed you would become.
30:43 - 30:49
A man who has to contact people, strangers by text and say, hey, we've been drawn together in this league.
30:49 - 30:55
Do you fancy a game? And then, but this game yesterday was with the original friend, because I trust him to.
30:55 - 30:58
Sort of played gently and it was a sort of rehabilitative game. But it is a mad situation.
30:58 - 31:08
In a way it's worked because now I have to play a range of people, which means I don't always lose because I meet a mix of opponents, some of whom are equally bad.
31:08 - 31:13
But the bigger picture is I've become a guy, I can't emphasize enough, in a squash league.
31:13 - 31:25
There's better than zero chance I'll be going to a squash social this Christmas. It's a fascinating sport to get obsessed with because for me, it's really stuck in about 1980.
31:26 - 31:32
As in, I think if you were to just put the word squash into the internet, probably a vegetable would come up.
31:32 - 31:38
But then a little while after that, it would be men with moustaches and very short shorts.
31:38 - 31:44
You know what I mean? Sweating. This is why, despite being a, you know, I played tennis a bit.
31:44 - 31:51
I participate widely in sports. And also, as you know, both of you know, I watch sport an enormous amount.
31:51 - 31:54
And yet squash had never crossed my mind basically for 25 years. And you're right, David.
31:55 - 31:58
Last time I thought about squash was probably a reference to it in a Harold Pinter play.
31:58 - 32:01
And that's not a, well, I suppose it is a joke, but it is true.
32:01 - 32:07
I remember, I think it's the play Betrayal by Pinter. But there's a, the character says something like, you don't want women around.
32:07 - 32:11
You want to play your game of squash, go for a pint, go for lunch.
32:11 - 32:16
Afterwards, you have your lunch, you have your pint, you have your squash game. The character is a composite of like an 80s businessman.
32:16 - 32:22
And this is exactly what you're talking about. Squash is the same timeline as, it belongs with business cards.
32:22 - 32:28
And it's that American psycho sort of, but, all that time squash has been a fantastic game to play.
32:28 - 32:34
It's just that it's never on telly and tennis looms so large in the public consciousness, but.
32:34 - 32:41
Max used to host the Guardian squash weekly. I did. In the late 80s. It was five times a week.
32:41 - 32:50
They would talk about. The game's gone now, but in those days. But look, tennis is visually better to watch, but squash is much better to play because if you're two shit players,
32:50 - 32:55
the ball stays in. So you just keep hitting the damn thing. I, I started learning.
32:55 - 32:59
I started learning with my friend, Ollie exactly the same time. And the first game we sat there and said, right, what are we playing to?
32:59 - 33:05
And we went right. Best of 300. We were both working at Sky at the time.
33:05 - 33:10
11 is conventional, but yeah. Yeah. He said 300 games. I think it was like first to 15 and whatever.
33:10 - 33:19
Yeah. We're 11. I'm not sure we played and we got to, I think I'm like 10 games that he was much better than me to start with, but then he had his second kid.
33:19 - 33:23
And so he got tired and I didn't have kids at the time. So that really helped me.
33:23 - 33:31
And then. I'm 50, 141 up. And I think I'm like nine, three up. And then he moved to Switzerland.
33:31 - 33:37
Well, that is a coward's exit. My knees had gone. And so we have never played that game.
33:37 - 33:43
Like we've never, now I'm in Australia. We see each other like a few times a year, but like not enough time to say, should we do those?
33:43 - 33:47
By the way, you do owe me six points. Just to round out our 300 game series.
33:47 - 33:51
Yeah. I thought the story was going to be with him going to Dignitas there or something.
33:51 - 34:00
And he won. He won't play. God, it was a good excuse. Because he was so, he was loosing by 10 games.
34:00 - 34:06
He was like, that's it. Forget my family. This is it. I've been depressed enough by sport that I've thought about euthanizing myself, I must admit.
34:06 - 34:15
But yeah, basically what you said is true, Max. The appeal for someone like me is I'm all right at tennis, but I'll never get beyond a certain low level.
34:15 - 34:20
And if you're playing someone, as you say, either better or worse than you significantly, tennis is just not that much fun.
34:20 - 34:26
It's just walking around a court, picking up balls. That's all tennis is. Yeah. Golf, I suppose, similar.
34:26 - 34:30
You have to be pretty good at it before it isn't just an exercise in walking around after stuff.
34:30 - 34:38
Whereas squash, yeah, you're hitting it so much, so many times. It's fantastic exercise because you cannot escape from the task of whacking it over and over again.
34:38 - 34:41
You also have to hit it unbelievably hard for it to go anywhere at all.
34:41 - 34:52
But yeah, above all, as long as there's not too big a gap in your abilities, you are, and even if you are getting well beaten by someone, you still can charge around and you can still whack the ball a fair bit.
34:52 - 35:02
So it is a very satisfying skill for someone that or again, I mean, I still play five-a-side football sometimes, but you can charge around a lot, but not get much of a kick if you need not be heavily involved.
35:02 - 35:09
Squash is a game where you will go home having absolutely, you've fully participated in something for an hour.
35:09 - 35:16
But that also means that you're more angry. When you start to invest in it, it feels worse to be shitting it because you've tried so hard.
35:16 - 35:23
With you and your friend, and Ollie is not here to defend himself, but I was a clean player, so I would avoid him.
35:23 - 35:29
But when I was in front of him, he'd always say he didn't mean it, but I'm not sure.
35:29 - 35:38
So hang on, the opportunity for dirt in Squash is smacking the squash ball at the other player because if he's in front of you, they get the point.
35:38 - 35:48
You're in agony and they get the point. It's like, no way. Yeah, if you're deemed to have obstructed their shot, then you lose the point, which does, there is a sort of window of dishonesty, as you say,
35:48 - 35:53
where you can just try and whack it at them. It's basically paintball. You lose and you get hit.
35:53 - 36:08
That's what it becomes. The only few times I've played squash, which was with a girlfriend in 2010, I was somewhat disappointed to find that the squash ball is a dead, sort of like an airless testicle,
36:08 - 36:18
as opposed to what Ivo Graham would describe as a Mavericks moon ball. I thought it was a hilarious, bouncy ball, but you followed it as it went round 35 walls.
36:18 - 36:22
No, it's the opposite of that. You have to hit the shit out of it for 20 minutes before you even start your game.
36:22 - 36:29
Otherwise, you might as well just be playing with a sort of doorknob. Yeah, I mean, most of the people I play with are delightful because we're all at a reasonably low level.
36:29 - 36:37
But if you meet a serious player, if the league throws you up against someone and you're out of your depth, one of the ways you know is you get to the court and they're not only already there,
36:37 - 36:43
but they're already warming the ball up. And as you approach the court, there's this terrifying sound of them going smack, smack, smack.
36:43 - 36:53
And they have the appearance of already having been there for an hour. Also, another red flag is I've played a couple of people who turn up with multiple rackets like they have at Wimbledon,
36:53 - 36:57
where they look between six rackets. You've got no business coming to the leisure centre with three different rackets.
36:57 - 37:02
That's a bad sign. That is a guy that's thinking harder than me about the game.
37:02 - 37:10
Mark Watkins, did you win this match? No, I lost, what, 11-9, 11-3, 11-9. So two very competitive games, a poor game in the middle.
37:10 - 37:15
But given that I've not played for six weeks and given that he already is better than me, I was satisfied with it.
37:15 - 37:28
Above all, there was a bit of a twist though, where obviously if you're watching, big if, because luckily no coverage, but if you're watching this game, you're watching to see whether I go over on the bad foot or hobble off or anything like that.
37:28 - 37:34
But what actually happened was he went for a ball he shouldn't have gone and went into the wall with his shoulder and he came away crocked.
37:34 - 37:40
So rather than aggravating my injury, the game just like transferred my injury to him, which is sort of good news for me in a way.
37:40 - 37:47
But the dream is that you both walk away without severe injury. Maybe you have to accept that in your 40s, that just isn't an outcome.
37:47 - 37:56
I'm not sure that's how physiotherapy generally works, that if you have an injury, if you can pass it on, no longer, your Achilles is now fine.
37:56 - 38:04
I'm not, honestly, I'm not questioning what's happened to you. I believe you. You don't get off the table and the physio says, right, your mate Alan now has your injury.
38:04 - 38:22
You should be fine. In turn, he'll give it to someone else. It's interesting to me and also perfectly Watkins-esque that you haven't gone for the modern version of squash, aka paddle, which I'm sure was one of the options,
38:22 - 38:32
which combines elements of squash, with elements of tennis, and I would say in a less kind of gladiatorial kill zone vibe.
38:32 - 38:37
I'm interested in paddle and a couple of nights ago I dreamt I was playing it, even though it's not happened yet.
38:37 - 38:41
My mate, the same mate who introduced me to squash, spends a fair bit of time in Spain and Portugal.
38:41 - 38:48
So he also, well, I believe it's quite popular. Anyway, he has played paddle quite a few times and every time he returns from Spain, he raves about it.
38:48 - 38:57
So it's very much on my radar. In the dream, I didn't know what I was doing, obviously, because I've not played so it was more like sort of pelota or something.
38:57 - 39:02
I was using my hand to smash the ball against, but I was informed it was paddle.
39:02 - 39:17
I have seen it on YouTube and there's no denying it looks fun. Although the way my mate describes it is, and in fact, two separate people have said to me that the reason for paddle's huge spike in popularity is because, as you say, Dave,
39:17 - 39:26
it's meant to be less confrontational, less gladiatorial. No one takes it too seriously. It's a bit of fun, a bit softer, but for that very reason, it's now been invented by real aggressive arseholes.
39:26 - 39:30
So by the time I ever play paddle, that golden era, it's like blue sky.
39:30 - 39:34
Paddle was like blue sky for a year. Everyone was like, isn't it nice here?
39:34 - 39:41
It's much nicer than the squash court. But by the time I finally get onto it, it will have developed a culture of everyone being horrible.
39:41 - 39:47
Yeah, well, here in the European Union, it's just paddle courts everywhere. I'm in Dublin at the moment.
39:47 - 39:52
I played three games of paddle already this morning. I'll probably have my lunch in a paddle court, you know?
39:52 - 39:55
Yeah, yeah, fine. That's all we do. You'll pay for it with the euro, of course.
39:55 - 40:04
And then you'll walk around Dublin thinking about all the money that was swilling around the city in the previous decade and how all of it went on paddle infrastructure.
40:04 - 40:13
The squash finishes, you obviously drent, like nothing drenches you in sweat like that. So I'm presuming either you shower at the squash court or you're going to walk.
40:13 - 40:18
Or is this an Uber situation? What's happening? Yeah, firstly, I can confirm you're disgusting after playing squash.
40:18 - 40:24
I tentatively jogged home very gently on the foot, which wasn't showing any real signs of wear.
40:24 - 40:29
And then showered at home. I'm capable of it, but I do not enjoy showering at a leisure centre.
40:29 - 40:37
I also don't really like showering. I'll do the mandatory showering at the swimming pool, but I also don't care to linger around a change room.
40:37 - 40:46
I'm surprised that people, I've seen people bring shampoo and seemingly actively enjoy showering in public places, but I find that a bit of a stretch of the imagination.
40:46 - 40:50
Yeah, me and my friend Nick went to the Oasis leisure centre for a swim.
40:50 - 40:54
You know the one just on Tottenham Court Road? Yes, a really fancy one. They've got Kraken.
40:54 - 41:01
There's cross-courts there, I'll tell you that. It didn't feel that, anyway, it was nice in there, but we went for a swim and there was an old man.
41:01 - 41:05
To be fair, I'm comparing it with my own leisure centre and you don't have to be too fancy to be that.
41:05 - 41:13
Anyway, carry on. There was an old man washing himself in the shower. We went for a swim for quite a long time and he was still in there.
41:13 - 41:18
Yeah, you start to fancy that he's come for the shower rather than anything else, yeah.
41:18 - 41:30
And you start questioning, do you not have a shower where you live? Anyway, okay, so we're home, we're showered, you're dressed, the day is ahead of you.
41:30 - 41:34
You've done some exercise, the kids are at school, you've got a great few hours ahead of you.
41:34 - 41:42
What I then did was go, and this bit of the day probably isn't as exciting to hear about, that's assuming it has been exciting so far, which is an enormous assumption from me.
41:42 - 41:54
Well, now, paradoxically, given what I've already said, I did go into an office because I, as well as doing comedy and writing books and such, I co-run a production company which looks after,
41:54 - 42:01
my tours and stuff, but also quite a lot of other stuff. So once a week, roughly, I go in and do, I'd work in an office.
42:01 - 42:06
20th Century Fox. Like a regular Joe. And that company was called 20th Century Fox.
42:06 - 42:11
And you're the big bot. You're like Mr. Cheese. You walk in and the underlings quiver.
42:11 - 42:16
Do the balls on your desk that knock off each other? I've got the balls.
42:16 - 42:19
I've got one of those things that you squeeze in your hand. Yeah, everyone quails when I come in.
42:19 - 42:24
It's like Alan Sugar walking into whatever the hell it is that he does. The main thing he does is.
42:24 - 42:27
He is the apprentice. And I've seen Alan Sugar on the set of The Apprentice.
42:27 - 42:32
And it's fair to say he isn't regarded with awe there. He's regarded with the patience of people.
42:32 - 42:38
He's regarded with forbearance. And he's regarded with an awful lot of rerunning the autocue.
42:38 - 42:44
So you've come in. You've fired a few people just to keep them on their toes.
42:44 - 42:49
Then you've rehired them almost immediately. Yeah, because I realised I didn't really have the authority to do that.
42:49 - 42:56
And also they do very specific jobs. Alan Sugar, I think he signed a birthday card to his wife, Alan Sugar.
42:56 - 43:07
Yeah, with his email address at the bottom of it. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so what do you do there?
43:07 - 43:13
What do you do there, Mark? You do some businessman stuff. Yeah, just do some big business, just like watching the numbers roll in.
43:13 - 43:21
I'm on the floor, I'm shouting. So Mark, you're organising tours for people. That's what the production company is doing?
43:21 - 43:28
The production company mostly organises tours and also makes radio. Radio shows, makes media, people say these days, but I didn't really talk like that.
43:28 - 43:38
My business partner and I are both in our 40s. What I did yesterday, for example, was write a press release and check some tour dates for a comedian called Lauren Patterson.
43:38 - 43:48
Production companies like us hire PRs to write stuff like press releases, but quite a lot of PRs, I don't think I'm speaking out of turn, are shit at press releases,
43:48 - 43:57
even though it is the core of their job. And so I frequently have to read them back, either for sense and grammar or just for imaginative prose, and I've started just writing them myself.
43:57 - 43:59
And then the PR company just puts their logo on it and sends them out.
43:59 - 44:12
So I did about five or six hours of that, I think. I was in the office from roughly one o'clock to seven o'clock, and I can be quite precise about that because I had to get back for Arsenal versus Manchester United because my son supports Arsenal
44:12 - 44:19
and I was going to watch it with him. But because of Amazon's weird takeover of the Premier League at this time of year, it started at 8.15.
44:19 - 44:26
Some listeners will know that there's a week where you can watch every game on Amazon, start at bonkers times.
44:26 - 44:38
So I faced a race across London to get back to watch this match with my kid who's at the level of obsession with, that I was, I suppose, at 15, where he needs to watch every minute of every game.
44:38 - 44:42
But because he supports Premier League team, you sort of can't always do that. Okay, so hang on.
44:42 - 44:52
We've gone from one till seven very quickly. And I don't want to like, I don't want to nail down on like the office politics, but like, did you eat anything?
44:52 - 44:57
Oh, plenty happened. Yeah, okay, right. I want some, a bit more info. Very well.
44:57 - 45:05
In that case, I'm happy to divulge that I went to Sainsbury's and bought back a box of those Christmas biscuits that you get, a selection box of biscuits.
45:05 - 45:09
I can't speak for everyone in the office, but I ate two Jammy Dodgers for a start.
45:09 - 45:15
Okay. This is, a lot of people will try to emulate your life to get this peak performance.
45:15 - 45:21
You're going to see a spike in squash. You're going to see a lot of people eating two Jammy Dodgers from now on, Mark Watkins.
45:21 - 45:28
Well, in that case, I should add that I only ever have Jammy Dodgers in fact, I'm not a huge biscuit eater other than plain chocolate digestives.
45:28 - 45:33
So if you want to emulate the sort of level of performance that Watson hits day in, day out, those are your biscuits.
45:33 - 45:42
But Jammy Dodgers are my go-to in a selection pack or something, because I think a part of all of us still is excited by the sight of jam in the middle of a biscuit.
45:42 - 45:47
They don't necessarily live up to it, but aesthetically they have something special about them.
45:47 - 45:55
Yeah. The promise of a Jammy Dodger is high. Have you had any lunch? Because so far I can't remember I can't even recall.
45:55 - 45:59
You've had one coffee. I don't recall a breakfast. All you've had is two Jammy Dodgers.
45:59 - 46:04
That's not enough to sustain a game of squash and some business. The breakfast never happened.
46:04 - 46:08
Quite often I fail to have breakfast and then participate in some sort of morning exercise.
46:08 - 46:15
Not always as hard as squash, but even a run or really any exercise is enough to leave you thinking, oh, I feel as if I'm about to die.
46:15 - 46:20
And you run through various explanations if you're 45 and then think, oh no, I just haven't eaten anything for 14 hours.
46:20 - 46:26
It could be that. I've asked my body to burn 600 calories without offering any compromise.
46:26 - 46:32
But yes, so I should have, on the way into the office, sometimes in the office, we order lunch in.
46:32 - 46:38
On this occasion, I was aware that everyone had made different plans. And so I bought a sandwich on my way.
46:38 - 46:44
So did you just have a sandwich? You didn't go meal deal? Because it's very hard to go sandwich and get nothing else.
46:44 - 46:49
Great question, Max. Thanks. You're right. I should have, because I was in a little bit of a rush.
46:49 - 46:55
I did just pick the sandwich. And as usual afterwards, as I walked away, it occurred to me I probably could have had a packet of crisps for next to nothing.
46:55 - 47:01
But it's easy. You know, it's an easy game to play from where you are, Max, in your shed in Melbourne.
47:01 - 47:07
You've never played the game. He's never played the game. He's there mouthing off about lunches.
47:07 - 47:14
What has he ever achieved at the highest level? How many lunches has he eaten in front of this many people?
47:14 - 47:24
Okay. So we've got top of the table. It's not really top of the table, but Arsenal are playing Manchester United, but you're going to have to make some dinner before that.
47:25 - 47:29
Make some dinner, David, or pay people to make it and bring it to me.
47:29 - 47:35
Hey, are all the kids at home? We've got all the kids. No, at this point, so I'm divorced.
47:35 - 47:41
My kids live down the road with their mum, to be fair. I didn't just sort of leave them to make their own arrangements.
47:41 - 47:48
I just put them up in a travel lodge permanently. Yeah, I've got them. I've got the kids.
47:48 - 47:58
Yeah, they're absolutely fine. Bye. I live with my partner and her daughter, but they're not My two kids move fairly frequently between the houses.
47:58 - 48:04
And when there's something like football, my son is here. But I had to stop at my ex's house, pick the boy up.
48:04 - 48:15
It's slightly tighter to kick off time than I would have liked. It's also in my head that I'm going to have to faff about with Amazon to get it to work on the actual TV because I knew I wasn't logged into Amazon.
48:15 - 48:23
All these things go through your head. It's another depressingly middle-aged problem, but it does take me a fair bit of time to get the TV to the place that I want it now.
48:23 - 48:26
There are too many... I feel very old complaining, but there are too many remote controls.
48:26 - 48:36
I often don't know which channel a show... Certainly a football match can be on Sky or whatever BT is calling itself or sometimes it's Amazon or occasionally it's YouTube.
48:36 - 48:41
It wouldn't amaze me if my son told me to get onto Disney Plus or something to watch a football match these days.
48:41 - 48:47
I have a question. I don't have a 15-year-old son. I have 19 bikes and they're different.
48:47 - 49:00
One of the ways that they're different is are you reaching the point where you can no longer help academically as regards mathematics that he's doing, etc.?
49:00 - 49:10
Yeah, I would say, Anne. I certainly can still help academically in the very limited sphere of English for a couple of years, probably.
49:10 - 49:17
And if he ever comes back and says, I need to put this poem by Chaucer into context, then I've got every chance.
49:17 - 49:22
But since I left university, very few people have asked me to do that. Certainly.
49:24 - 49:35
there's a version of a gag that you often see on social media where it's like, is there a doctor on the plane and someone says, it turns out they've got a PhD in engineering or whatever it is.
49:35 - 49:40
But in that joke, I don't even get out of my seat. I don't even pretend that I'm going to be any use.
49:40 - 49:46
If you need a sonnet written about the deceased man, I probably could do that.
49:46 - 49:55
My dad's a doctor and he was once on a plane and they were like, is there a doctor on the plane?
49:55 - 49:59
And my dad said, yes. And they said, could you tell us what's wrong with this person?
49:59 - 50:04
And my dad went up to them and he went, they're dead. And then they went, would you like to move to business class, please?
50:04 - 50:13
He went, yes, please. Bloody hell. So now it's a stunt that Max and his father do every time they're on the plane.
50:13 - 50:19
Amazing stuff. So it's almost as if they weren't even looking for you to save the man.
50:19 - 50:22
It was just a test to see whether your dad deserved to be in a better bit of the plane.
50:24 - 50:27
That's actually your final exam as a doctor. They get you on a flight with a corpse.
50:27 - 50:33
Then you celebrate in business class. One of these 300 people is a corpse. Can you get it?
50:33 - 50:44
I'm going to go for B. But yes, David, you're right. Where maths is concerned, there was a period in lockdowns where all of us were having to do stuff with the kids.
50:44 - 50:52
And at that point, my boy was like 10, 11. And I was still at the stage where I'd say, all right, give it here with a certain amount of confidence where maths was concerned.
50:52 - 51:01
Now he's GCSE and there was a moment a couple of years ago where I said, give it here, looked at it for a couple of minutes and then just gave it back to him and said, now.
51:01 - 51:20
I haven't got the first fucking clue what the question even means. Yeah. Watkins, you just wait 20 years and when podcasting is a subject for GCSE and they will be listening back to episodes like this,
51:20 - 51:28
it'll be like, how do you describe Mark Watson's tone? In the what did you do yesterday episode?
51:28 - 51:38
Yes. Is Mark Watson's lack of economy even when he has another appointment to go to a deliberate trope or a debilitating character trait?
51:38 - 51:45
Brackets, 20 marks. The issue is your son will be 35 so you're hoping he's not still at school.
51:45 - 51:53
Yeah, they repeat the odd year don't they if things have gone wrong but by 35 you're sort of looking for him to stand on his own two feet to some extent, yeah.
51:54 - 52:01
All right, so you've sat down you've ordered wow, you've ordered a delivery what are we getting for dinner?
52:01 - 52:13
What are you and the boy getting? Yeah, and my partner actually cooks a lot and is brilliant at it but there are times when you draw a line under what you can reasonably ask and I feel like getting back two minutes before a match starts and then saying
52:13 - 52:23
right, what's for tea is the sort of there's a generation of men that did do stuff like that but temperamentally I don't think I belong to or generationally and so it's very much a case of Indian food.
52:23 - 52:40
Oh yeah, live Indian food watch the football have a curry have a fight and I tried to time the order so that it arrived for half time and incredibly that is what happened it's been very rare in my life you see these adverts especially for pizza
52:40 - 52:54
and things like that where during major tournaments the adverts are all like half time coming up but I get a pizza and these adverts dramatically missell how quickly you can get a pizza delivered if you're watching an advert before the game and you're like and they're telling you
52:54 - 53:10
to get pizza for half time it's already probably too late I've had pizzas not arrive till well after the final whistle but last night yeah the gods smiled on me the half time whistle blew and within moments the notification came Mark this is difficult for Max
53:10 - 53:27
because as someone who has anchored many football matches on Australian television the idea of you eating while he is conducting analysis is absolutely sacrilegious I'll stop you there because when I was doing the Champions League as soon as all you like honestly I've said this before live football
53:27 - 53:37
is the easiest thing you have to do like compared to actually like hosting a show like a radio show where there's no football in July or something this is you just go oh Real Madrid are playing AC Milan what do you think what do you think
53:37 - 53:50
what do you think and then all you have to do is get the intonation exactly right for saying and it's now time to join your commentary team Don Goodman and Simon Brotherton and as soon as I say that I sit down people bring me breakfast like literally
53:50 - 54:02
like I'm just sitting there eating and eating and a minute before half time and go right better get up get up that's it honestly so rack it you said Don Goodman and Simon Brotherton with the exact the exact timbre of somebody that's host
54:02 - 54:15
anchored a lot of football there yeah and I suppose the half time punditry is basically just a matter of saying well this penalty what do you think and then they'll they'll just have it out between them with the curry question questions firstly what are you ordering and secondly
54:15 - 54:29
have you got like plates and cutlery laid out on the table when it arrives or are you eating in front of you just out of the tub because I wanted to because my I'd also ordered it for my partner because I wanted to the evening to retain
54:29 - 54:42
the semblance of a family evening even though it was just a splash of football I did indeed lay out cutlery and serve the curry as if I'd prepared it myself which I only did by the definition of clicking a few buttons yeah and by how much
54:42 - 54:54
did you over order in fact hardly at all because I've used this exact same curry house often enough to know what over ordering is whereas I don't have we don't have Chinese very often and so
54:54 - 55:11
when ordering Chinese I still am in the significant proportion of the population that over ordered by 50 to 75% so what's on the menu what are we getting can we guess do you want to guess Dave yeah I'm going to go like Watson's delicate constitution doesn't lend itself that Achilles
55:11 - 55:30
will just pop again if he was to go Jalfrezi or something like that so I mean please don't the physio did say also no spicy curry please don't take this the wrong way but you had a lot of lamb korma and your son had a mixed biryani
55:30 - 55:49
very very interesting I'm there were some definite onion bhajis and I'd say there's one chicken tikka masala there's one lamb rogan josh and there's an aloo gobi a couple of guys and a naan and you're just mixing it all together fascinating absolutely fascinating how people see you yourself
55:49 - 56:03
as others see you we've left off Dahl David what are you sorry sorry you were right to leave off Dahl this was not a very nuanced order because I was you know really doing as fast as I could to get it in on time you're right
56:03 - 56:21
about the naans and the rice obviously I suppose that's a fairly conservative guess and fascinatingly lamb korma is correct but that was my son's order not mine so you're sort of halfway there mine was and to be fair adjacent to a chicken tikka masala but not called that
56:21 - 56:35
it's one of these ones that a restaurant has where they say our own speciality so you believe you're not ordering a basic curry and it's called something cooler but to all intents and purposes it functions as a chicken tikka masala I had a girlfriend who lived in Putney
56:35 - 56:54
and so we used to we used to order from the Putney Tandoori I remember it so well because it had sorry so far this has sounded like the start of a pulp song just continue yeah Putney Tandoori from his and hers I was downtrodden yeah
56:54 - 57:12
I was living out of a shoe and she had a she had a tiara yeah she was already married but you had sex with her above a newsagent exactly on a chandelier but no it had testimonials it had testimonials from celebrities and it said it was wonderful food
57:12 - 57:33
David and Joyce Dimbleby and the next quote was excellent Indian cuisine comment by many celebrities so that's too vague yeah that's too vague they won't have all used that exact phrase surely you've got Sophia Loren you've got Lauren Bacall Sinatra you just Sidney Poitier yeah
57:33 - 57:46
they all said that Mr Sinatra Mr Sinatra how was your meal excellent Indian food yes and adore we don't have space on the we don't have space on the menu let's just we'll just combine the lot of them if you can think of a celeb
57:46 - 57:57
assume that they've said it did you enjoy the game did your son enjoy the game not really he's a man in an iPad no my brother my son's an Arsenal fan I should make clear oh forgive me right
57:57 - 58:10
so he he did enjoy the game but it was a very tense 45 minutes during which he did a lot of just kind of like muttering and clenching his fists and stuff like that and if it had gone much longer nil nil he would have started
58:10 - 58:31
to do the things which teenage fans do which is regurgitate stuff they've seen on social media so start basically decrying the club's recruitment policy maybe allege that the Premier League in some ways is biased against the club basically start talking about foreign players that if they'd
58:31 - 58:46
signed him for £100 million we would be ahead now but he was maybe about five minutes away from tearing down the whole infrastructure of his beloved club when luckily they scored from a corner and then it was all fine so I was I was unfortunately engaged
58:46 - 59:03
in showbiz last night so nothing happened in the first half and then part two they obviously got an old team talk at halftime they drank some Bisto and they came out and Arsenal scored many goals you could actually tell because when they came out for the second half
59:03 - 59:19
the players were all wiping Bisto off their faces and stuff like that Odegaard had a big stain of it on his shirt you see people say Arsenal are a modern team and the manager is using all these modern motivational techniques turns out the secret is drinking Bisto
59:19 - 59:32
at halftime it's all it's all Bisto you can you can see in the first half Arteta the manager was turning to the bench and mouthing Bisto Bisto and then you saw a fella go off with his mug to make it because they have set piece
59:32 - 59:48
but they also have hot drinks specialists now exactly that's what Arsene Wenger brought them into the game I once spoke to Lee Dixon who used to play you know who saw Wenger come in as Arsenal manager so he'd seen both the old regime and the new
59:48 - 1:00:00
and he said that there was an old school there was a doctor who the club doctor would give everyone two jelly babies in the dressing room before the match and that was what passed for like nutrition in the early 90s football and then Wenger was doing his
1:00:00 - 1:00:16
first ever team talk the doctor's just making his rounds with the jelly babies and politely in the way we can all picture Wenger said Mr Doctor what are you doing and that was never seen again okay so
1:00:16 - 1:00:32
full time in the game and then is it bedtime or do you send the boy home to bed it pretty much almost was bedtime the boy stayed at mine I packed him off to bed that went a lot more smoothly because they'd won the game and then
1:00:32 - 1:00:46
as I like to do in the bookend of that thing where I sit up in bed thinking shit shit what now I like to end the day with a wine normally just sort of like reviewing what I've experienced and
1:00:46 - 1:01:05
congratulating myself on another day as a human without major incident if there's been no don't do that are you happy I mean I would say the thing I'd be most happy about is that your Achilles worked for the whole squash I mean I get so much happy chemicals
1:01:05 - 1:01:19
from moving around at the moment I have a busted knee and I can't do anything and I am losing my mind I did find it immensely frustrating and I started resorting to things like rowing machines or stuff you can do in the gym where you're not actually moving
1:01:19 - 1:01:28
but where you also aren't really enjoying yourself at all I was pleased but I was aware that the test of the Achilles would be the morning and it is now
1:01:28 - 1:01:41
the morning after and it feels sort of tender but alright I was prepared to get out of bed this morning and for my tendons to say you are a fucking idiot and you will now not be moving again for three years but it doesn't feel like that has
1:01:41 - 1:01:52
happened I find if I have one glass of wine I find it really hard to just have one I don't know if you can just do one and go right that's me Jamie will have half a glass and I'll be like oh I've just got to
1:01:52 - 1:02:10
get on with this I also find it's hard to just have one and so in fact last night it was two and a half okay that's lovely initially as one because that's um that makes it seem to get you off to bed it's better finished what was
1:02:10 - 1:02:27
left in the bottle I think yeah we'll call it one glass but yeah one of those novelty glasses you get for Christmas one of those uh pinot grigio lady memes which is just one glass and it's uh her driving her car around inside the glass exactly a visual
1:02:27 - 1:02:40
gag of a drink and then do you do you then go brush your teeth straight to bed and then do you just fall asleep like that or do you lie awake thinking of catastrophe that's coming at 3am no I'm normally pretty good at just falling asleep
1:02:40 - 1:02:58
I think basically um yeah a couple of very simple tricks have a bit of wine and also go to bed quite late do those you're fine okay sometimes I see people tweeting about like complaining about insomnia and stuff and you're like it's 9 30 you're a grown-up
1:02:58 - 1:03:20
so yep stays up till 6am yeah scroll through your phone for three hours then you'll sleep or more likely you still won't sleep but at least it'll be late enough you'll be resigned oh hey thanks for coming on mark it's been a pleasure very nice uh very nice
1:03:20 - 1:03:42
engaging idea for a podcast well i first doherty first tweeted about it as it then was and it was called what did you do yesterday and i thought i bet it is just this podcast is not going to ambush any listener with with too much substance too much
1:03:42 - 1:04:08
substance hang on this is an incredibly profound podcast this is these are our lives mark watson this is yes they are what is there to talk about if not our lives are being well thank you very much for coming at it yeah thanks thank you hey david
1:04:08 - 1:04:24
enjoyed mark watson imagine if we actually guessed it's watkins imagine if we'd actually guessed his indian order the whole thing though yeah that would have been good so spooky i once i once guessed the exact weight have i told this one i haven't got many anecdotes
1:04:24 - 1:04:38
at a frozen yogurt place in melbourne if you at a shopping center if you guessed the weight of the frozen yogurt that you had made yourself you got it for free to the exact gram and i got it to the exact gram and it may be the
1:04:38 - 1:04:56
greatest moment of my life i talk about it quite often and how now how is that did you see the problem is so presumably was it in kilos or i think it was grams i think i said it's 321 grams or whatever it was and then they
1:04:56 - 1:05:12
put it on the scales it went ding-a-ling-a-ling 321 grams was that a total guess or do you do you know weight i don't like no weight by like sugar i know how much i tell you i know how much a 16 kilo kettlebell is because it's all i had in
1:05:12 - 1:05:27
lockdown i mean i had my wife obviously but like i had so i reckon if i pick something up i know it's 16 kilos but this was before then this was pre-covid yeah yeah i i thought from having had children you might because people talk about the
1:05:27 - 1:05:44
weight of them quite a lot you might have learned a little about weight i know i was yeah i was a real heavy one sorry mom but i mean none of that's about what we just listened to which i think was i don't think mike would mind
1:05:44 - 1:05:59
i've always liked just a boy's been such a big fan and um i really enjoyed his day i like his just just like he's got i like his manner david he's one of those people who we could ask him any old shite and
1:05:59 - 1:06:19
he will generally put quite a profound take on us you know what i mean and we're looking for guests like that on this podcast specifically well i mean this podcast is at its strongest when you're philosophically delving you know you're taking a step because everyone's basically doing the
1:06:19 - 1:06:38
same thing this is what we've learned after the what the 3 000 episodes that we've done now everyone's kind of doing the same stuff but it's how they think so i did enjoy him watching the football match i did enjoy his son starting to blame all of the problems
1:06:38 - 1:06:53
of football on the match itself until hang on he can't drive or ride a bike these two things are wild yeah that is to not be able to do either of those things i'm interested if anyone listening is listening to can also do neither of those things
1:06:53 - 1:07:06
that's a good choice that they've made well the fact that his university specialization was chaucer is he possibly living a life from that does he just have a little cart and an ox and
1:07:06 - 1:07:19
he moves around england really slowly did he go method when he was in the late 90s when he was at university and he's just stayed that way and that's what he's doing um anyway if you'd like to get in touch with the potter here is how
1:07:19 - 1:07:29
i'm going to to get in touch with the show you can email us at what did you do yesterday pod at gmail.com follow us on instagram at yesterday pod and
1:07:29 - 1:07:44
please subscribe and leave a review if you liked it on your preferred podcast platform and if you didn't please don't thank you david and please do get in touch because we do like hearing that sounded a bit desperate we're not desperate for your email to point that
1:07:44 - 1:07:59
out but we just like them we just like to know you're enjoying it we hit a rich vein of correspondence simply ask people what they do while they listen to what did you do yesterday so yeah what did you the listener do yesterday while you were
1:07:59 - 1:08:09
listening to what did you do yesterday the podcast let us know but also if you have had a profound moment like a lady joanna who can no longer bathe because of david and
1:08:09 - 1:08:16
his lowering technique let us know uh thanks david thanks max and we'll be back next week