2011 What A Year!!!!!!!!
So then I’m fully aware that I have a ton of posts to add to my blog, and I will get around to it. I’ll be honest there’s a couple that I’m waiting for the dust to settle before I post all about my experiences with incompetent promoters, and the rest, well I’ve just been too damn busy doing Xmas shows!
Thinking back to this time last year, I wouldn’t have thought I’d have written that last sentence. I was facing what I genuinely believed was my last ever gig - NYE 2010 - and looking forward to finding (or losing) myself in India.
I was excited and fearful at the same time. Mentally I wasn’t in a great place at all, the deaths of my Dad and Jason Wood in February 2010 were still making it difficult for me to find joy in anything, and what I really wanted was to join them. So the trip to India was really about finding a reason to carry on.
Of course I do depression in style, so I arrived in a sweltering Mumbai mid-January and proceeded to the Taj Palace hotel for a couple of nights before heading down to Goa. One of the best surprises was bumping into Camilla who 20 years earlier had sold me assorted bags, beads and god knows what else. She recognised me after all this time and I her. We both had tears in our eyes as we caught up on what’d been going on in the previous two decades.
From Goa it was onto Delhi for a fabulous trip spent with Rames, my driver and guide as I explored the delights of Delhi, Jaipur and Agra. I was speechless at the beauty of the Taj Mahal. I remember the last time I was in India saying that I would come back one day and see this place, now here I was achieving that. It was a really emotional moment.
Rames was concerned that I was heading off to the Osho Commune in Pune. Needless to say Osho doesn’t have a great reputation in his own country, even 20 years after his death. I wasn’t sure what to expect at all, every Indian person I mentioned it to referred to the old reputation he had as the ‘Sex Guru’ and seemed to think it was still a shagfest. If they were right, it was gonna be a dull old three months for me!
I won’t go into all of the details of my time there (I’m sure if you scroll back it’s all here somewhere) but things did change, not least of all I turned 50 in March! Not in the way I wanted or even expected them to of course - life doesn’t work like that. Suffice to say that after 10 weeks in there I was reminded that I love doing comedy, and that I’m nowhere near as fucked up as I thought I was!
Once that realisation had dawned I fired off a few emails to my favourite promoters and booked up a summer of gigs. My first one back was MC’ing Up The Creek - a perfect place to re-start. As I waited to walk up onto the stage, it suddenly hit me that it’d been more than five months since I’d done this and I got a frisson of nerves I’d not had for years. Within 30 seconds of being onstage it was like I’d never been away and I loved it!
Sadly offstage I was dealt a pretty massive blow health-wise. It turned out that my aching and swollen joints are slowly succumbing to both osteo and rheumatoid arthritis. I cannot begin to tell you how much this has devastated me. Five years ago when I had the gastric bypass and lost half my body weight, the main incentive was so that I wouldn’t have too many health problems in my old age. Likewise I gave up smoking for the same reasons. Now here I am at 50 with Lupus and rotting bones and it really stinks. I’m on medication that is making me gain weight and most days my knees are too sore to do much to stem that.
In what was an otherwise pretty crap summer for me there was one huge highlight. I was incredibly lucky enough to be able to go to Wembley and see Take That - all five of them for the first time since the 90's! It was a terrific experience.
Take That aside, it’s no wonder that I quickly booked a ticket to bugger off again in October. I decided to fund part of this trip by booking myself in for some gigs in Singapore and Indonesia during November and my return was planned for next summer. After a few weeks of doing gigs I was made an offer that was too good to refuse which resulted in me changing my flight to allow a six week trip back to the UK in December.
It was 18 months since I was last in Bangkok and I’d really missed the place. I love the energy, the dirt and the gloss and the craziness. The first thing I did when I landed was head down to my favourite travel guy on the Khao San Road and book a return trip to the Tiger Temple.
My goodness! If it was magical the first time round it was moreso this time! I handed over the extra cash and got to play with fully grown tigers in their swimming area, followed by giving one of them a shower and some dinner. Yep I hand fed a grown-ass tiger and felt no fear. How freaky is that?
From there I flew to Ho Chi Minh City and began my love affair with Vietnam and their delicious Pho Bo. I hadn’t planned it, but what with the floods in Thailand and the fact that it’s such a brilliant place I spent almost a month there. I did have a little side trip to Cambodia, a place I definitely want to see more of in the not too distant future. Angkor Wat was mindblowing!
Singapore was pretty much as I expected it to be, clean and shiny and the gigs were great fun, as was spending time with my pal Johnny Candon. Bali was a delight, so much so that I ended up spending longer there than I’d originally planned. It was also the place where different parts of my world came together - I was so lucky to be able to meet up with Aussie Tridzia whom I’d met in Kuala Lumpur the year before and also with my best pal from the ashram Danielle. It really meant a lot to see both of these amazing women and it brought home to me just how small this planet is.
On what would’ve been my Dad’s 85th birthday I flew back to the UK and hit the ground running as far as gigs were concerned spending most of December at Birmingham Highlight in the company of the fabulous Jackie Frost and a roster of some of my favourite comedy chums - and I got paid for all that fun.
Christmas was what it was, I spent it in Hamburg in a very nice hotel that had a spa that was open on Christmas Day which meant I could experience my very first hot stone massage - it felt good but nowhere near as amazing as the Wat Pho massages I had in Bangkok - that’s a proper Thai massage!
Now here I am on the day before New Year’s Eve and unlike this time last year, there’s no big life or death decisions to be made. What I have learned this year more than anything is that life isn’t Black or White, or Right or Wrong. Sometimes life just is and 2012 is gonna be full of all kinds of things I have no control over or even stuff I’ve not yet thought about, and that’s what keeps me going.
Happy New Year!
Labels: Gigs, Misc and TV, Travel
posted by JoJo Smith at Friday, December 30, 2011
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