First post from Montreal.

Every time I tell someone I'm moving to Montreal I always add 'for a year'. This is a reminder to myself more than anything. It's only for a year. That's because the whole escapade is enormously stressful - a new country, a new language, a radically new climate and an abandoned network of friends, sources of income and Greggs outlets.

So why have we done this? Why have we done this? WHY HAVE WE DONE THIS?

This was a question I asked myself frequently last week as I woke up at 4am every day to monitor my jet lagged and dangerously curious toddler in our death trap of a temporary apartment. With my partner in bed, suffering from a chest infection (though she could be faking it) I flitted between stopping my son from climbing the stairs, turning the oven on and licking the wall sockets. Concessions have had to be made. I've decided that it's ok if he licks the wall sockets. Fuck it. You can't wrap them in cotton wool forever.

We've done this because my partner had the opportunity to transfer with work, because we've always wanted to try out another city and because death is always looming (sorry lads, it is) and one doesn't know if one'll get such an opportunity again.

When you tell a Montreal resident you've just moved here they all look at you like a veteran, sixty smokes a day detective and remark 'so your first winter huh?'. They love that. The consensus seems to be that from January until March it's minus 30. The internet says otherwise. I even pulled out my phone and thrust it in a bartender's face - 'Look! Minus ten! Minus ten!'. She laughed. At me, not with me. I've never felt minus thirty. Perhaps that's where I'm at my best. 'You know I never really hit my peak until I spent three months in an industrial freezer'. I guess they could be fucking with me. The whole city is built on a lie. It's named after Mt. Royal which is not a mountain. It's. A. Hill.

The place has a lot going for it. Excellent food, friendly people, plentiful pool tables and a perfect place to hideout after all the murders I did in London earlier this year. Thus far I haven't had much of a chance to experience it. Until we find our proper apartment, we can't stick the boy into a daycare and despite being nearly a year and a half old he is still utterly incapable of taking care of himself. And so the woman trudges into work and me and the boy run out of things to talk about.

There is a chance that in twenty years time Louis (his name) will, waist high in climate changed water, find this blog and perhaps I should moderate what I say about him accordingly. Look, son, in 2018 you were endlessly cute and my love for you was boundless but as a conversationalist you were piss poor.

"What sound does a cow make?"

"Mmmm"

"Good. What sound does a dog make?"

"Oufff. Ouffff."

"Good. What sound does a duck make?"

"Du! Du! Du!"

"Ok. Can we talk about the mid terms now? There's a lot going on. All this voter suppression doesn't bode well for 2020 does it?"

"Du! Du!"

This week is all about trying to get mittens on a toddler and then keep them on the toddler. So far I haven't come close but it's about to hit minus ten (which apparently means minus thirty) so it's either stay inside, get mittens on the boy or teach the boy a thing or two about frostbite.

I have to go now. I had an incredible smoked meat sandwich an hour ago and it's currently aggressively introducing itself to my bowels. Here's an observation - every other commercial on television here is for a bowel medication. Concerned looking woman after concerned looking woman with a voiceover about constipation. But then every other advert is for a fast food outlet yelling "THE TEN FOOT HIGH DEEP FRIED PORK CHOP BURGER DELUX - BABY YOU NEED IT!" Could these two things be connected? Or am I just being overly suspicious? No collusion!

Belgravia pub trip.

You may remember a while ago I went through I brief period of visiting dirty pubs and writing about them. That venture was scuppered when my friend got punched in the face and I re-evaluated the smarts of entering such fight ridden joints armed with only a middle class face and a strong pool game.

Last week I went to the opposite end of the spectrum. Have you ever hung around Belgravia? It's an area of London so posh that Monopoly couldn't afford to feature it on its board. Enormous mansions, 4x4 Rolexes and the lingering question 'What do all you fuckers DO?'

The answer for some of them is go to the pub. I started with The Grenadier. I became aware of this pub when looking through the Sunday Times Rich List and seeing a picture of Britain's richest man stood outside it. Worth a look, I thought. Walking down the mews in which it's situated and seeing the blazer-ed crowd outside I pondered on what I'd discover within. Chateaux Neuf on tap? A quail shitting eggs in the corner? The bloke from Razorlight?

What I did find (as arranged) was my Old Etonion friend. By pure coincidence I had invited my poshest associate. If the place suddenly descended into an Eyes Wide Shut style ritual I trusted he'd show me what to do.

It was different to your average pub but not radically so. Plummy voices filled the air and the card machine took American Express but I wanted to see something spectacular - two land owners demanding that their servants fight for betting purposes - something like that. I suspect I might have learned more if I'd listened in to their conversations.

That wasn't a problem in the next pub we visited - The Nags Head. This was next to a corner shop in another mews and when my friend and I entered we increased its patron population from three to five. 'Take a seat!' said the drunkest of the original three. We sat at the bar and he proceeded to give us a twenty minute long monologue on why the 'Nags' was London's last remaining proper boozer and would always be there for us. 'You'll always have the Nags. If your lady is giving you shit, you know that you can come down the Nags, have a beer and chat to your mates'. This was performed with theatrical cockney masculinity. I don't think this man was faking his cock-er-ny twang but I wanted to know how come his local was surrounded on all sides by £40 million properties owned by Qatari arms dealers.

Before long his alcoholic actor friend arrived, a man so rosy cheeked he had to be a Baron. This dude looked like every minor Richard Curtis character drinking a stupidly large whiskey. Then an elderly gentleman sat at the bar and ordered a sparkling water, then a well dressed Indian man came in and joined in the fun, buying everyone a Guinness. Now it is possible that this Indian gentleman simply works in a shop in Mayfair and stops off at the Nags on the way home to his modest flat in Tooting. But I refuse to believe that. There was something about the way he carried himself and my preconceptions about anyone who buys a round of drinks in Belgravia that made me certain he is the CEO of one of the world's top three chemicals companies.

Although I wouldn't call the Nags 'London's last remaining proper boozer' it was impressively pubby. No leather sofas or restaurant vibes here - just beer, bar stools and some eye rolling Irish bar staff. But how does such a place survive in an area with what I can't be bothered to look up but have decided are the highest rents in Europe? The same goes for the corner shop next door. There's no way selling milk and Twix's brings in enough revenue to compete with whatever the Crown Prince of Richdickistan pays to rent the place across the street.

My assumption is that there's some kind of arrangement between the local residents that they'll allow these places to continue. 'It may well be that I am the man behind turning every other corner shop in Britain into a Tesco Express but on a personal level I actually find them a little gauche'.

And so while the 99.9%  have to find shelter from global warming in soulless retail parks the architects of its destruction will be maintaining their own little enclaves of the British idyl. I fully intend on joining them. My goal is to become a Nags regular, ingratiate myself with the clientele, persuade a Duke to fall in love with me and live in an outhouse on his land in exchange for one buggering a week.

I was bullied.

One morning when I was fifteen, I walked into my form class and one of my peers punched me in the side of my head for no reason. I did nothing in response, I just sat down. Yesterday I turned 38 *leaves for an extended period of vomiting before returning to the keyboard to complete the sentence* and only now am I starting to admit to myself that I was bullied for pretty much the entirety of my school life and that it had a major effect on me.

There was only one other violent incident that stands out. This was when I was about ten and a case of mistaken identity. Riding my BMX up and down the back lane, two slightly older boys approached and accused me of playing the violin. 

"He plays the violin"

"No I don't. Honest"

"Yeah you do"

"No, you're thinking of Max. He lives at number 16"

Notice the way I so easily gave up my best friend at the time.

"He's lying. He plays the violin. Get off the bike."

I then proceeded to do as they asked, put myself into the embryo position on the ground and allow them to kick the shit out of me until a neighbour shoo-ed them off. 

These two stories give a good hint as to not only why so few string quartets come out of Newcastle but also why I was bullied. I didn't fight back.  I just didn't have that instinct. 

There were a few other reasons. I was a geek, interested in things. Being interested in things is not a good look at school. At the age of five I asked the teachers if I could give a talk in assembly on Islam. I wasn't boy-ish. Although I was obsessed with sport and had that Aspergers like obsession with facts that all boys seem to have, I didn't have that boy-ish posture or love of smashing shit up.  I was timid, I flinched easily. This was interpreted, as anything out of the ordinary is at school, as being 'gay'. The word gay followed me around everywhere - shouted at me in corridors or from passing bus windows.  Despite a pretty solid record at getting girlfriends and my weekend hobby of bike riding to distant newsagents and buying the highly nippled Daily Sport - I was 'gay'. And I was just a little bit odd. Still photos of me in conversation still usually catch my hands gesturing in strange positions or my grin extending Ardman Wallace like. These oddities have at times been beneficial in my career as a comic actor. They weren't as a child.

Now when I walk into rooms I no longer fear being punched in the head or hearing a colleague suggest everyone stick their backs up against the walls. But I do have, somewhere in my recesses, a fear of attack. This has led me to build myself a sort of defence system otherwise known as a dysfunctional personality. Every now and again someone tells me 'I thought you were a bit cold, a bit of a nob at first but actually you're alright' which I have to tell you is a fun conversation. I'm very cautious about showing enthusiasm for things or people. Showing you care about something is a vulnerable act. I wrote an entire book and 2,700 tweets mocking my own industry. This may well have been a way of projecting "I don't care whether you cast me or not, I don't like you guys anyway". Of course I do care but am incapable of showing it.

My experiences have served as a useful motivational tool at times. I've given all my tormentors imaginary miserable lives made only more miserable by turning on the TV and seeing my success as a star of under the radar digital channel sit coms and Birdseye chicken commercials.  

But when the work isn't coming in, when I'm in an actor's trough (Actor's Trough could be an excellent euphemism for something filthy I expect) what am I left with? Twenty years of social anxiety, a dickish demeanour and a poor track record at making friends. No one has come out of this well. I wasn't even on the bottom rung at school - I floated just above it - think of the lifetime effect on those who took hourly savagings. 

It's too late to change my personality now. I have what I have, all I can do is work with it. 

Writing this has given me a knot in my belly and a quiver in my lip. I'd like to end on a positive note but that doesn't feel honest. I am ashamed of being bullied which seems rather unfair, that I should have to suffer the shame, but it's the truth. The entire experience was utterly without merit. And there I go again, not showing enthusiasm for things.

Was Britpop Shit?

Today there is so much stuff in the news about the 20th anniversary of Oasis's gigs at Knebworth, that twenty years from now people will be asking not 'Were you at Knebworth?' but 'Where were you when you found out it was the twentieth anniversary of Knebworth?'. I was there. On the second night, so 20 years tomorrow, which means my 'Christ, I'm old' hasn't kicked in yet. Being there on the second night meant that I missed out on seeing The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers but did get to see the 7,378th most memorable band of the 90s Dreadzone.

Here's what I remember about Knebworth. Me and my friend took a coach there which took a couple of hours, arrived at about midday and immediately found a spot where we stood for the next eleven hours. I am almost certain that I did not have a piss for the entire day. As someone who now urinates twice in an episode of Gogglebox, I can confirm that if I miss one thing about the 90s it is my bladder. I wish I'd got more done really. If I'd had known just how much of future decades were to be taken up by bodily functions, I might have written a couple of symphonies.

Was Britpop shit? Does anyone listen to Britpop anymore? I mean, does anyone ever stick on a Longpigs album? I fully signed up to Britpop. I bought the NME every week, I listened to Steve Lamaq, I bought that 7inch single which was just a recording of an argument between the Gallagher brothers, in the Blur vs Oasis singles battle I sat on the fence and bought one of each. Britpop just happened to coincide roughly with my pubescent need for a culture to join in with.

It feels to me like the last mono-culture of its sort. By 1996, being a British teenager and not liking either Blur or Oasis was unusual. It started as something vaguely alternative but ended up, until the Spice Girls, being almost entirely dominant. Britpop events like album releases or big gigs were regularly on the news. As a teenager, I felt like I was part of a movement comparable with the 60s. I wasn't was I? It was just some, mainly average guitar bands singing the sort of songs that Robbie Williams would go on to sing. If your mum will let you put a tape on in the car then it's not really an significant musical movement is it? It was safe and I don't mean 'safe' by its 90s meaning - I mean no one's mum was worried about them going to Knebworth because they'd already worked out that we were a generation of pussies.

I'm only really talking about my experience of Britpop really aren't I? I'm sure you were all doing crack with Dreadzone. But I really don't think there's been a British musical movement of its size since, nor one that was more disposable or entirely un-revolutionary ever.

My friend Kris

My friend Kris asked me to write a blog post about him. Usually I don't take (or get) requests. 'Mate! Mate! Do you think you could do us a quick 700 words on the Chelsea Flower Show?'. The thing is though, I've got to somehow drag myself off the topic of politics and this request to write about Kristopher Robert Beattie has offered me an opportunity to do so.

You will have already noticed two things about Kris. One: he is the type of person (perhaps the first in history) to ask for someone to write a blog post about him for no discernible reason. Two: he spells his name with a K. That wasn't his choice but his parents'. I like it. It sort of says, "I'm normal but not that normal". It says - "Yes, I work in office supplies but on the weekend I smoke rollies and rock out with my buddies".

I haven't seen Kris in person for about five years. That's because he moved to Wellington, New Zealand with his Kiwi girlfriend and their half-Kiwi son. Since arriving there they have added to the collection, making a half Kiwi daughter meaning that they have, in total, one full Kiwi.

Kris and I became friends in roughly 1995 and, as I remember it, spent pretty much the entirety of the summers of 1996 and 1997 together. He was the first person (other than my brothers) with whom I remember laughing to the point at which I was in danger of vomiting. What we laughed at I do not really remember. There was one incident when Kris had a small squeezy toy frog. It was designed so that when you squeezed it, its tongue would curl out and flick. One night we squeezed it again and again. Sometimes the flick would be hysterically funny and sometimes it wouldn't. I have thought about that frog a lot. There is no way to describe what it was that made some flicks so funny and others not at all. There are hundreds of books written about how to be funny. There are hundreds of people who's job it is to critique comedy. I bet none of these dicksplats could explain what it was that made one of those frog's flicks funnier than another. 'For something to be funny it has to be true' - you obviously didn't spend four hours in Kris Beattie's living room on a Saturday night some time in 1997. Yeah, Saturday night. How old were we? About 16.  For some, their teenage years are about snorting ketamine - not us.

I guess I should try and describe Kris but he doesn't seem to have any photos of himself on Facebook for me to work off so I'm going to have to do it from memory. Kris's skin colour is ever so slightly yellow. He is racially white and, as far as I know, entirely English in heritage and yet he somehow looks foreign. But then, if you were to ask me to name which country he could be from I'd be totally at a loss. I suppose he looks half Greek, half orphan. He has a slim, somewhat elastic physique and is naturally comic in the way moves. He was a strong exponent of the curtains haircut so popular in mid nineties Essex. Despite his slim build, Kris eats a lot and I would take a guess that he is the only one of my friends to have salad cream in his house. Kris knows more than anyone I know about boxing, Olympic sprinters and lower league football. Kris taught me Blackbird on the guitar. Kris once half heartedly mentioned to one of his parents that he thought Bugs Bunny was kind of funny and for the next five Christmases he received Bugs Bunny presents and therefore had a teenage bedroom fully stocked with Bugs Bunny merchandise. Kris is the sort of person who probably knows what the capital of Ecuador is. Kris is probably the only person from Braintree funnier than his dad with honourable mentions going to our school friend Matt LeCount and former Prodigy haircut man Keith Flint. Kris is enormously likeable and yet he is also the sort of person who I could imagine asking me to write a blog about him and then telling me he thought it wasn't actually as good as he'd hoped. Unprompted, Kris once told another friend of mine that that friend was jut jawed. Kris once sang Happy Days to me in German, which I then stole and used in my stand up routine for five years. Kris has a very solid cue action but he sometimes lets himself down on position and is a little over reliant on stun shots. Kris is very good at accents. Most people would describe Kris as happy go lucky in nature but I believe that as he gets older, like me, he is finding himself prone to moments of angst. If I remember correctly, Kris was once the only non Asian person working in an Asian restaurant. Kris is more curious about other people than anyone I have ever met and I reckon is the only person from our year at school who could still name everyone from our year at school. Kris and I's friendship is probably the closest platonic one I've ever had. Kris was once a postman for a while. In 1998, Kris and I murdered a stranger together, buried the body and have never spoken about it since.

Some observations about being an insomniac.

Television in the middle of the night features a frightening amount of adverts for online casinos. I presume they've identified their target market as people watching the Eden channel at 3.30am. Here's how an online casino advert goes... a man (usually a man) alone in a mundane flat opens up his laptop and inexplicably doesn't go to Pornhub. Instead he goes through to Sky Vegas or whatever and suddenly everything is amazing - he's wearing sunglassses, he's dressed like James Bond, he's travelling down the Las Vegas strip in a convertible, he steps into a casino, lights, lights, glamorous flashing lights, an attractive available looking woman in a red low cut dress is standing behind a roulette wheel, a deep voice over says something like 'Do something with your life! Be a man!'. Is there anywhere in advertising in which the lifestyle displayed is so different to the reality? Anyone signing up for a casino website at 3.30am is either pissed or so depressed that their only other option to brighten up their evening is to call into Talksport. How the fuck is this allowed? The only explanation is that those in charge of regulating gambling advertising are all asleep at 3.30am. Sky Vegas have handed the authorities the tape of a responsible commercial but play something monumentally immoral when nobody but the vulnerable is looking.

I know you're not supposed to watch television when you're trying to get to sleep, by the way. The advice seems to be not to do anything that might stimulate you. Well what the tit are you supposed to do then? Stare into the darkness and contemplate your own inadequacies? My entire life is spent avoiding that exact thing. My current method is to watch nature documentaries. I find them relaxing. David Attenborough's voice is the closest I've ever come to finding whatever drug it was that Michael Jackson's doctor was giving him. The problem is it doesn't send me into a deep sleep, just enough that I can't quite keep my eyes open. So I drift in and out of a light slumber and every so often awake to the sound of bison head butting or the sight of an intensely ugly fish.

Here's the main thing about being an insomniac - it's boring. Every week or so I'll go through a night in which I don't even achieve an Attenborough induced flitting in and out of consciousness. Just hours and hours of nothing, of analysing the morality of casino adverts, of returning to and from the bathroom just for something to do. On these nights there's always the belief that sleep may just be round the corner, so best not to ward it off by doing anything interesting. And so you bury yourself alive in tedium, trying not to rerun arguments you had in 2002.

Then you do the following day on no sleep whatsoever. People ask how you are and you reply 'tired'. But it doesn't feel like an earnest kind of tired. You're not tired because you've been taking care of a new born baby or up late working on a vaccine or recently back from LA after some interesting meetings with NBC. You're tired because just before bed it occurred to you that you're not sure if you ever went to a Shed Seven gig or not and now you can't stop thinking about it.

You won't BELIEVE this blog post about Oslo!

A couple of months ago, I told you about a trip I made to Cape Town to film a Swiss insurance commercial. A week or two ago, I had the pleasure of going to Oslo, tasked with selling insurance (for a different company) to Norwegians. About ten years ago I went to Rotterdam to make a Dutch insurance commercial. So these days, when I lie awake in bed at night one question rattles around my skull, tormenting me into the early hours - 'What is it about my face that makes mainland Western Europeans want to buy insurance?'.

Is it my bloated cheeks that makes them think of their own inevitable deaths and the need to ensure their families are protected? Is it my greasy nose that puts them in mind of the small time criminal who will burgle their house? Is it my enormous forehead that reminds them of the twin towers and that an unthinkable tragedy can strike at any time? Whatever it is, I am happy to exploit my features in exchange for disappointingly low fees and short trips to cities I am yet to visit.  

Oslo! What is the one thing people say to you before travelling to Norway? Do they mention the beauty of the landscape? The Fjords? The utopian Scandi-socialist society? No. They tell you that it costs £8 for a pint. This is the one piece of information all Brits have to hand about virtually every country in the world. Open your window now and shout at the first passerby you see - 'How much does a pint cost in Prague?' and watch them confidently shout back 'somewhere between 90p and £1.20'. Now ask them to name one Czech President, past or present. They've gone haven't they?

£8 though. £8! My technique was to imagine that each time I bought a drink, I was buying a round for me and a tight mate who never returned the favour. Still. £8! For £8.99 you can buy the complete works of Norway's greatest writer Henrik Ibsen. For £8 you can buy a pint  (actually, thanks to the metric system just under a pint) of pilsner and then half an hour later watch that £8 leave your body in the form of piss. I appreciate that if you're not blessed with the right kind of genitals (penis, balls) this is more difficult but it is my understanding that it is possible.

I expect you're hoping for an insight into Oslo that goes beyond alcohol pricing. Filming the commercial took three full days (Norwegians are nothing if not thorough in their insurance advertising) so I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to explore. I can tell you that Oslo is a pretty city that hints at a far greater beauty once you leave it and head into the rest of Norway. It was like winning a competition to meet a One Direction member and getting Niall. Sure, he's attractive, but he's no Zayn.

Oslo has an impressive opera house, a viking museum, some nice parks and for a city of it's size what seems like a surplus of TGI Fridays. Overlooking the city is a giant ski jump. This is what I chose to visit on my day off. It seemed like something one should do in Scandinavia. Holmenkollbakken (and yes, I did open another tab to check the smelling) can be seen from virtually anywhere in the city and has a capacity of 70,000 spectators. This suggests that sometimes over 10% of the population of Oslo are inclined to go and watch people put themselves at the mercy of gravity in the name of sport. And why not?

It being summer, there was no snow and henceforth no ski jumping. There were plenty of visitors though. Many, like me, chose to have a look around the ski museum there. I wonder if, when looking at glass cabinets stacked with skis from 1871, 1895, 1910, 1922, 1927 and 'oh, look! 1931!', any of them had my overwhelming thought - 'I do not give a fuck about any of this'. What I wanted to do was get in the lift and head straight to the top of the ski jump and after an hour of queueing, that's exactly what I did. I'm pleased to report the view did not disappoint. I did the only thing I could think of to do when looking down over a city I would most likely never visit again - stand there for roughly 2 and a half minutes, take a picture and then get back in the lift downwards. 

So, unfortunately the length of my stay means I'm only able to offer you a snapshot of Oslo. Although if you're depending on this blog for all your information on the world's capitols I'd think about looking into some other sources. I've always been curious about what it is about Scandinavian countries that makes them top all the happiness, health and education rankings but I didn't have the time nor intelligence to work it out. The simple answer we're told is democratic socialism but there has to be more to it than that. Surely? Because if that's true then the rest of the world is missing a trick. I have to say the houses looked lovely and the people looked healthy. There has to be something darker beneath the surface. There just has to be. Look at Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's face of late. There's a man who's seen some horror in his life. And I mean, seriously, £8 a pint!