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What are your 30s for? They’re not the decade of being young; they’re not yet the business of middle age. Having recently completed them, I’m none the wiser; in my case, they were much ado about a great many things.
Older friends oversold my 30s to me.
‘In your 30s,’ some of them would say, ‘You’ll finally know what you’re doing. You’ll know what interests you and what you want.’ They neglected to mention that would also create the problem of not getting it.
I began my 30s with a change, namely my decision to move from Berlin to London, to live in my own country’s capital for the first time. My 30th year itself was grand, as round numbers often seem to be, with my comedy career in Germany at its apex and, frankly, my attractiveness to the opposite sex peaking too.
I have particularly fond memories of train journeys across Europe at the time, heading back from Belgium with my rucksack stuffed with cash I had earned doing comedy and, later and even more gloriously, speeding through the Bavarian countryside after a gig I had performed in the small Frankish town of Bayreuth. The beauty of the scenery on that late autumn day was contrasted only with the severity of the hangover I felt.
But then I came back to London and life got hard and British. I was soon back in full-time work, in an obscure job, which I’ve written about here. I was struck by how harsh the general tone of England at that time was, a kind of moneyed cruelty, as I read the articles in the Evening Standards and Metros on long bus rides. Still, at least in the very early days in London the sexual confidence Berlin had given me had seemed to translate, and I enjoyed a ripple of early female attention.
After a year in London I started doing comedy again. And that marked the biggest step-down of all; from performing to hundreds at a given time, I was now doing my set to eight comedians and even on one occasion paid five pounds for the privilege to perform. There was so little real fun in these nights, and it was made doubly hard by the audiences being made up largely of comedians. Comedians are a poor audience for comedy. As I joked at the time, in a set gradually tailored to perform to exactly these kinds of rooms, ‘Comedians only have two response two other comedians; bastard, and no threat to me.’
I also soon found myself in the London dating scene proper. This often involved long meetings with women who lacked particularly high levels of social skills which were devoid of chemistry, saw a high level of expenditure on alcohol, and usually ended with a text message saying it had been nice but they weren’t interested in me in a romantic sense. Which had usually been evident within five minutes of the date beginning.