Is It Just Me? (35 page)

^*
mouth falls open
^*

Seriously, we are a comedian.

SHUT UP!

Are you bouncing up and down?

I
am
bouncing up and down.

Me too, although I have to hold on to my breasts to do so without damage.

I can’t actually believe it. We get into comedy?

Yup.

I feel like crying.

Life may not be easy, Little M. Things do go wrong and it can be very tough. There isn’t a road map for all the small but tricky issues in life. But if you follow your dream, you heart’s desire, you will always be moving in the right direction, however much you may come a cropper on a beach, or in the hairdresser, or at a wedding.

The amazing thing is, for all that may not be quite right in my life, I do have my dream career. For how long, I don’t know. The shelf-life for jobs like mine is pretty unreliable. But today I can call myself a comedy actress. I’ve gone from being the person hanging around the stage door for autographs, to the person being hung around for. This will never cease to amaze me. I did old sketches by heroes like The Two Ronnies, Victoria Wood and French and Saunders in village halls, and now I’ve actually met them.

Excuse me, hello, sorry? Did you just say . . . WE’VE MET FRENCH AND SAUNDERS?

Yup.

No way. NO WAY. Shut up. SHUT UP!
^*
shouts at her school friends, who are quietly putting on their gym kit
^*
‘Guys, GUYS! I MEET FRENCH AND SAUNDERS WHEN I’M OLDER!’

Calm down!

Calm down? CALM DOWN? This is BEYOND amazing. I mean, I’ve just watched them on the TV and dreamt about perhaps one day doing a sketch with them or being in a play with them and them being my best friends and we all sit around and have tea and scones together and laugh and laugh and laugh and you – you’ve actually . . . I mean . . . how did it go? When you met them?

Not too shabby, actually.

Oh, phew.

Well . . .

Oh, no. WHAT did we do?

No, no. It’s fine. It’s just . . . there was sweat involved. Meeting heroes is sweaty-making. There was so much sweat, in fact, that it seemed as if all the moisture in my body, and a good portion of the Dead Sea, had gathered on my upper lip.

YOU HAD A SWEAT MOUSTACHE WHEN YOU MET FRENCH AND SAUNDERS? I’m cringing.

It wasn’t that bad. But actually there was a moment when a bead of sweat rolled its merry way off my lip and landed on my breast, which I dealt with by declaring loudly, in the middle of the conversation, ‘Don’t worry, that was a sweat-dribble; my breast isn’t leaking.’ Which turned out to be entirely unnecessary as they hadn’t noticed the dribble in the first place.

You might as well have ‘carried a watermelon’. I am revolted and ashamed.

Well, if it helps, my attitude was, ‘Sod it, I’ve just met French and Saunders.’

True. Wow. WOW. I am going to have a celebratory box of Flumps.

You do that, Little Miranda, go – chill out, eat, eat your Flumps, and live in hope. Because things do happen. Things do change. Worry really is futile. Don’t fear the future. Dreams do come true, and I have the sweat-spattered shirt to prove it. I may not (yet) have become the Wimbledon Ladies’ Singles Champion, but I have briefly met Goran Ivanisevic. He isn’t (yet) my husband BUT . . . I did shake his hand and emit an inaudible, high-pitched cross between a laugh and a cry, which I’m hoping might have been interpreted as a sophisticated Croatian mating call.

You see, you may not be a muso, you may have spent what sounds like dull years working in an office, you may be worried we aren’t married yet, you may be depressed that we are culturally still a bit of a vacuum, that we are old before our time when it comes to adventure holidays and that we no longer do organised sport. But, firstly, some of those things that don’t seem ideal at the time inform the future and, secondly, so much
is
good, and I have a hunch that there’s so much good still to come.

Thanks, Big M!
^*
sits back, happy, looking forward to the future for the first time
^*

Now, MDRC, back to you for a final flourish. I hope your dreams have come or will come true. Or you feel inspired to down tools on what you wrongly thought was making you happy and follow the real dream. I feel happy and lucky and blessed to have had so many dream moments come true. And there is so much more that I hope I will tell you about some day. Oh, so much. But, for now, the time has come for me to bid you
au revoir
– definitely, I hope, not goodbye, my lovely, lovely chum. Right, well, off I pop. But I shall leave you with this last story. I think it sums it all up pretty well . . .

I was once on a very jolly Christmas chat show. Also on the bill was a massive star of small and large screen. A multimillionaire, a respected international legend, someone for whom all dreams have supposedly come true, and who, on paper, has a ‘perfect life’.

However, at thirty-eight, when I finally feel my life is beginning and that I might be able to start doing things my way, I know that even that star regularly feels like an idiot. To varying degrees, we all feel awkward. Whether we hide it with arrogance, shyness, modesty; whether we play the clown or the trendsetter, everyone struggles.

At the end of the show, we all had to sing along to a naff (and therefore very much to my taste) Christmas song. Fake snow was falling in the studio, the audience was clapping, there were dancers wearing Santa hats: it was a joyous, camp romp. I forgot I was on television and, as I lustily sang and bopped along, feeling wholly content, I glanced along to the other end of the sofa, at the star. They were looking pained and a little nervous. Out of place. They looked at me. They saw me freely camping it up with my truly marvellous ‘sitting-down hand-and-shoulder dancing,’ and said, not meanly – I believe searchingly and perhaps with envy – ‘You just don’t care, do you?’

I could have thought, ‘Help, I must look like an idiot: I am on telly, doing sitting-down hand-and-shoulder dancing, while this person is playing it cool and I most definitely am not.’

The eighteen-year-old me would have stopped immediately, crushed by the peer pressure and pretended it was all ironic, but
I
carried on. And with total confidence, I said, ‘No. I really don’t.’

Life, eh?

1
There probably
isn’t
going to be a fast-paced legal thriller section. Soz.