Comedian Spencer Jones who will be taking his latest show DOGS to this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe shares his experience of Loneliness and how he found his own pack.
I hear the front door slam downstairs. It’s the last noise of my family leaving, my kids to school, my partner to work. Kind of like my unofficial alarm. Bang. Now you’re on your own. Silence. We used to have a budgerigar that provided a gentle cacophony of tweets, squawks, and all sorts of little twitters, taking a rather eerily quiet house, and turning it into something that had life in it. An antidote to the basic noises I make; heavy breathing, occasional guffs and groans due to not enough exercise, poor diet and aging joints respectively.
Rather than get out of bed, open the blinds and start my day with some London sunshine, I reach for my I-phone and open up Instagram. I’m looking for a pre-coffee serotonin hit of the ‘Like and Follow’ variety. It’s a weak brew and ultimately unsatisfying but I slurp it down. The online community. Currently the biggest community in the world. Billions of people all reaching out to one another, sounds pretty good right? The reality is Doom-scrolling (as people seem to be calling it) is actually really lonely. I read somewhere, actually, scratch that, I didn’t read it anywhere, I saw it in a one minute clip, that my morning routine is a terrible way to start your day. Whatever! What do they know? Who ever ‘they’ are. I can’t remember, I don’t think I even finished watching that clip before moving onto a clip, where a dog that had been severely neglected was nursed back to health, by some much better people than me in another part of the world. Or it might have been a clip of Nigel Farage, saying something annoying, the toad. Or it might have been ex footballer Ian Wright being reunited with an important father figure from his past. I can’t remember.
I finally tear myself away from the perfect algorithm and plod downstairs. The dog looks hopeful that it’s time for walkies. But she can wait. I need caffeine and painkillers. But I say out loud to her: “let me just get myself together and we will go out in a while. I need to wake up, have a quick go on Fortnite (a Playstation game for children), then I have to write a thing about ‘Loneliness and Modern Life and Finding Your Pack’ then I’ll take you out for a walk” I know the dog doesn’t understand long sentences like this. I’m saying it out loud more for myself really. I hope saying these things to my Chihuahua Jack Russell cross will help keep me sane. I do have a habit of saying stuff out loud, but it’s usually not good stuff. At the Co-op I call a bottle of diet Coke a prick because it wasn’t a bottle of full fat coke. Co-op had none on the shelves so that moment venting my frustrations on a sugar free inanimate object felt like the right thing to do.
Back home I start writing the thing you are currently reading, but then I feel tired and after another quick go on Fortnite, I accidentally fall asleep on the sofa for two hours. Not ideal.
It’s cheese on toast time and this is something I do very very well. Out loud, I say, positive affirmations about my brilliance of cheese on toast. My ratios of cheese to bread (plus fire) are spot on (DM me on Insta for numbers) this is washed down with a non-diet cup of tea (one sugar)
The look on the dogs face has now turned from hope to despair. Well at least that’s how I’m reading it. I crumble. “Come on then let’s go” I say to her. She understands this and legs it to front the door. Out we go into the glorious streets and back roads of Plumstead south east London. We moved away for a few years to the country which was nice but I love the feeling of the place round here. All sorts of people from all sorts of places doing all sorts of shit. It’s never boring. When I walk around a city the phrase that keeps coming back to me is: ‘This is enough. This is enough for me’ And even though a dog walk through a bit of London I love should be enough I still feel the need to take head phones and fill my head with James O’Brien on LBC. Usually on catch up because I missed the start. He’s a smart man and a nice man and provides me with a bit of a moral compass about the things we should be thinking about.
I usually remove one ear to say the obligatory, hello to other dog walkers whose paths I cross.
So far today my only interactions are that I have guffed, groaned, insulted a bottle of pop, and said hello to a man who I don’t know. I spend vast amounts of time alone. Sometimes I love it.
I can do what I want, apart from on Wednesdays when I get rudely awakened by the Dustman.
I spend a lot of time in the car, a 23-year-old Honda Civic currently with 179,000 miles on the clock, driving to comedy gigs. Sometimes I’m in the car for six hours driving to a gig. And in this modern world of podcasts, I should be taking advantage of them. It seems a lot of my comedy mates do. The hours should fly by, but I am not a massive podcast consumer. I think I have ADHD and I get bored very easily. So once the car is loaded up with props and musical items, I usually get on the phone (chill out mate, I’m on headphones/handsfree) and call in no particular order: Mum, Brother, Dom, Lucy, David, Rob, Daniel, Kenneth. If none of them answer then I’m screwed. BBC Radio 4 can kill a bit of the journey and also, I can have sing song on my own. Currently I love belting out along with the instrumental of Elbow’s One Day Like This, Paulo Nutini’s Pencil Full Of Lead, Divine Comedy’s National Express and Hip To Be Square by Huey Lewis and the News. Karaoke for one? But the band were with me briefly. But then I am back to silence and being alone in the car wondering if this is the still the best job in the world.
Where is my pack?
Feels like the world is happening around me and I’m not in it. Everyone else seems to have clubs and groups and clans and gangs they are always in. Ive seen photographic evidence on Instagram, so it must be true! The truth is I’ve always felt like an outsider. We moved around a lot as kids so I was often the new kid at school. My identity wasn’t really set. I wasn’t even from one area. I’ve had so many different jobs, that didn’t seem to go anywhere. I didn’t go to university because I knew there was no chance I was going to be able to concentrate on the academic stuff. I floated, and drifted, and occasionally swam but the current always seemed to be taking me a different way.
Then the journey is over, I get to the gig. Park up, I’ll take some stuff in (props clothes et cetera) I go into the green room. I’m always the first one in because I have to do sound checks and stuff. Then some other comedians arrive. They’ve also had to travel. They also had problems on the M25. They are also bored of doing tax returns, picking up dog poo, and forgetting to have beans on toast before they leave. It’s the only time I feel like I’m with my pack. Comedians. It’s ever evolving line of vagabonds travelling around the world, making groups of drunk people laugh. I love green rooms. I love the chat. It makes me feel normal talking to the wonky, wobbly, distracted, tense and chatty fools. Swapping stories about ridiculous gigs, punters, comedians, dying on their arses. They’ve seen it all and they’ve heard it all. So, when you’re telling them your shit, their eyes light up and they nod along. So I am alone. Most of the time. But sometimes I’m not.
Spencer Jones: Dogs will be at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from the 5th – 3th August (not 17th). For more information visit: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/spencer-jones-dogs
