Thanks for all your lovely replies about last week’s Tape! I was pleased to hear that my story of humiliation and idiocy struck a chord with so many of you. Isn’t it great that we’re all really stupid? I promised that if people enjoyed that story – my favourite from my time spent thinking that dating apps would make me happy – I would write my second-favourite this week. So here it is. This one is about confidence.

I had been chatting to someone for a few days, and it was becoming increasingly clear that this person was wild. My suspicions were first aroused when she sent me a message saying “I bet you want me to eat chocolate eggs off your eyes.” I wasn’t quite sure what this meant – I knew what all the individual words meant, but was having trouble picturing quite what she had in mind. I replied saying “What?” which I can now see was perhaps a little blunt of me. It probably wasn’t a very nice experience for her to allow herself to be vulnerable enough to share a strange, imaginative little fantasy and to be met by me saying “WHAT?”, but I just needed some help clarifying what it was that she wanted me to picture. But she obligingly clarified for me. “You want to sellotape creme eggs to your eyes so that I can eat them off,” she explained. I was taken aback by this – I remember being on a bus at the time, and furtively looking around me to make sure nobody was reading my messages over my shoulder, because it was the raciest message I had ever received in my life and I didn’t want people around me to think I was some sort of pervert.

My privacy ensured, I reread the message. This sounded insane – it sounded more like something she wanted. The confidence she had to simply lay this image at my feet and tell me that it was actually what I wanted was unfathomable to me. Who was she to reach into my private inner life like this, and tell me what lurked there? I had never in my life attempted to instruct other people about their own wants and desires. Was she right? Did I want to sellotape creme eggs to my eyes so she could eat them off? I tried to picture myself with creme eggs sellotaped to my eyes. In my mind’s eye, it made me look like some sort of helpless bug. Is that what she wanted? Or was I picturing it wrong? She wanted to eat the eyes of some sort of giant human bug? I tried to work out how to reply to this, and settled for “Haha, yes.” We arranged a date.

Our first date was very nice, but the only weird part about it was that I was kept up until 2am by texts from her asking if the date had been ok. I kept replying saying that yes, it had been really fun, but that I needed to go to sleep now, to which she would reply with “OK but you didn’t have a bad time? I couldn’t really tell if you had a good time or not, was it something I did?” I didn’t interpret this as a red flag at the time, for two reasons – number one, I know exactly how it feels to meet someone and become very intensely obsessed by worrying about what they thought and hoping you made a good impression. In a funny way, I found her total transparency about that kind of thing refreshing. Admittedly, I had never just given voice to those insecurities after a date in the way she was doing, and the intensity of receiving so many messages for such a long time was really quite exhausting, but I understood the impulse that they were coming from.

Number two, she had been very open about suffering from OCD, and I had just spent a year working in the national specialist children’s OCD clinic at the Maudsley Hospital, so I knew a lot about the illness and was very sympathetic to it – I suffer from a lot of symptoms of it myself. The recurring fear that you might have said or done something wrong is a frequent obsession among sufferers, and the need to check, either internally or externally, is a frequent compulsion. It’s a horrible illness, and I wasn’t about to ghost someone simply for exhibiting symptoms of an illness they had been very open about having. So I assured her I’d had a really nice time, and suggested we go for another date sometime.

Our second date was at a book event where writers were reading extracts of their work, and she was reading a short story she’d written. She was incredibly nervous, and I kept encouraging her, telling her she was going to be great. We watched the first half and she read her story and it went down really well – I was pleased for her and congratulated her, but she didn’t seem happy with my reaction. She became more and more sullen and withdrawn over the second half, shifting in her seat away from me, until eventually, when the night was over, she rounded on me and snapped “You have absolutely zero self-confidence. Like, none at all. You need to work on your self-confidence.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Ok.” I had no idea what had provoked this – maybe she had wanted me to have been more effusive in my praise, or more physically affectionate in congratulating her? I had no idea. I just knew that hearing it had really hurt my feelings. I didn’t really know what to say after that, so I apologised and thanked her for a nice night and congratulated her again on her story and started walking home. On the way home, I saw a traffic cone. At the time, I was working on a show which I knew I needed a traffic cone for. I had borrowed one for a work-in-progress show in Edinburgh and found a fun clowning routine where I kept pretending to fall over the traffic cone. After that WIP I had returned the cone to the street corner where I had found it, so I knew I needed to get another one at some point if the routine was going to be part of the show. I had been planning on buying one, but I was in a bad mood and feeling sorry for myself so when I saw this one I thought “Right, I’ll just take this, and then at least I get that out of tonight. That’s the sort of thing a confident person would do.”

About five minutes further down the road, a police van pulled up alongside me and blared its sirens to make me stop. A policeman wound down his window and leant out to talk to me.

“I don’t think that’s your traffic cone,” he said.

“Sorry,” I replied, “I was going to use it for a comedy show. I’m a comedian.”

“What sort of comedy show?”

“It’s kind of like, absurdist…character stuff I guess? Sort of clowning.” He nodded, his blank expression seeming to encourage me to go on. “Like, the idea is that I’ve been replaced by a guy called Mr Fruit Salad, but it’s just me in a beard and sunglasses. But he’s got a theme song and stuff. And he lives on Clapham Common and plants bonsai trees for a living.” I was floundering. “I mean…do you watch much live comedy?” The policeman nodded.

“Yeah, I watch comedy,” he said. “I don’t see many comedians using traffic cones, though. What do you need it for?”

“It’s hard to explain.” The policeman looked at his partner, smirked, then turned back to me.

“You can have it,” he said. “But only if you do the routine for us now.” This didn’t sound to me like an offer being made in good faith. I tried to think about how much it might cost to buy a traffic cone online – maybe fifty quid? Then I tried to imagine what it would be like to put the traffic cone down on the pavement and pretend to trip over it, and then go “Oh no!” and then stagger backwards and trip over it again, and go “Ahh, I keep tripping over this traffic cone, help!” I tried to picture myself doing this on the street in the middle of the night in front of a police van and the thought of it made me want to cry. I tried to do the maths to work out whether it was an experience I would pay 50 quid to avoid.

“No, don’t worry about it,” I said eventually. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh go on, do the routine,” he pleaded. “We could do with a laugh, couldn’t we?”

“Yeah, why won’t you do it?” asked his partner. The truth was, after I had conjured up the mental image of me pretending to repeatedly trip over a traffic cone in front of two policemen, it no longer felt very funny.

“Well I don’t have my beard or sunglasses with me,” I said. “And it just won’t be very funny out of context,” I said, trying to hold onto my belief that it was the context only that was draining my faith in the idea.

“Well if it’s not very funny, maybe you shouldn’t be stealing other people’s property for it and should think of something better to do with your time,” said the driver.

“Yeah,” the other policeman chipped in, “and maybe you should think about whether you can go round calling yourself a comedian when you don’t even think your own ideas are funny.” They made me go back up the road to leave the traffic cone where I’d found it, and then I trudged home again.

I had the strangest feeling that somehow, despite my evening dividing very clearly into two parts, actually I had only experienced one thing, just from two different angles. The universe had decided to hand me an evening where I was confronted in the harshest terms by my own self-esteem issues, looked at through a diptych of impressions or variations. Granted, the first time I saw it through the lens of someone whose anxiety caused her to lash out at me because I wasn’t offering her the tangible reassurances she wanted, and the second time it was through the lens of some jobsworths who thought it would be funny to taunt me, but it was the same thing, really.

That was one of the last dates I went on. I just wasn’t having very much fun. I had one more after that where I arranged for us to go for dinner at what I thought was a dim sum restaurant, and turned out to be a live sex club, although in my defence, they did do very nice dim sum. We ate while reading the various flyers on the tables which advertised an extreme BDSM kink sex party event that started at 9pm, and noticed that a lot of people in long leather coats were starting to turn up at about 8:30, and it meant that we really rushed our dessert. I actually really enjoyed that date, and tried to arrange a second one, but she said she didn’t feel a romantic connection and wished me the best.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – If you live in the Manchester area, you should get your ticket to Edy Hurst’s Wonderfull Discoverie Of Witches In The Countie Of Himself, which launches at the Lowry Theatre on Hallowe’en! I’ve had an amazing time directing the show over the last year and am excited to see it begin the next and most exciting stage of its life so far!

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – Speaking of directing, I’ve also been rehearsing with the Mayor and his Daughter this week on their new show, and really lost it while trying to pin down what is actually happening in one of their sketches. They have a great knack of making work that wriggles away from any attempt to define it, and it really makes me laugh.

Book Of The Week – I’ve just started The Poor Mouth by Flann O’Brien, which I found on a garden wall in Herne Hill this week. I loved O’Brien’s bizarre fable The Third Policeman but have never read anything else by him, so am looking forward to this – it describes itself as “a bad story about the hard life.”

Album Of The Week – The Last Flight by Public Service Broadcasting, which revisits their gimmick of making synth-rock music to accompany vintage archive audio, this time chronicling Amelia Earhart’s last flight. I always really like PSB’s music, but this album feels a bit like them on autopilot. Last year’s live tribute to the BBC, This New Noise, was so brilliant that maybe I was primed for disappointment with whatever came next.

Film Of The Week – The Outrun, an adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir about recovery starring Saoirse Ronan as an alcoholic who relocates to Orkney to reconnect with herself. It’s a slow, internal, plotless thing, as you’d expect, but the atmosphere and feel of it is amazing. It made me want to run into the woods or the ocean.

That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you think, and if you enjoy this newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d really appreciate it. Take care until next time,

Joz xx

PS If you value the Therapy Tapes and enjoy what they do, and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing and creating, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated.

PPS Happy 5th birthday to Mother Canteen, the best community cafe in north London. Here’s to another 5 years!

Click here to go back