This year is more than half over but it also feels like it’s barely begun. A fairly obvious observation, with lockdown and Covid-19 messing with all of out routines and perceptions of time.

I quite like to boil down all of my frustrations into a flippant sentence, which is why I’ve been telling people that I picked a bad year to pivot to pet sitting and sketch comedy promotion.

Unfortunately, it’s true.

But! Next Level Sketch, the sketch comedy collective started by myself and one of those friends who make me actually get out of bed and do things, has been a constant source of joy over the past few weird months.

We haven’t been able to perform on stage, and like the rest of the grassroots comedy / arts / music / civilisation community, we don’t quite know when people are going to want to pack into a sweaty room above or below a pub again.

In the meantime, we’ve been putting a podcast together. A podcast full of funny sketches, weird jingles, and stupid fake adverts. We’ve just released the fifth episode, so we’re one away from having the magic number that makes a BBC style series. I will email the episodes to the corporation and see when they fancy putting them on air.

I can never work out how public this blog of mine is, or if people read it, or even if I want people to read it. But I’m writing my post to remind me of a good creative project, through which I’ve learned a lot and met many excellent people, and I’m sure I’ll look back on it with pride and fondness when I stumble upon this post from wherever I am in five years’ time.