Baby's first newsletter

And all the things I won't be writing about

Hi Substack :)

I’m a 34-year-old comedian, lifestyle writer and actor living on the south coast after spending over a decade in London. Me and my hubby bought a teeny little abode right next to the sea and completely flipped the sh*t out of it. It wasn’t easy (#bathwastegate will forever be etched into the darkest parts of my soul) but it was worth it. Now, we divide our time between our quaint little town and London… unless one of us is on tour, which is quite a lot of the time.

I used to write a lot of print and online magazines before I started doing comedy full time and - although I’m still deputy editor of a little London magazine where I get to trial quirky lifestyle hacks and visit funky west London pizzerias - I haven’t had an opportunity to write any opinion pieces lately. Luckily, a pal directed me towards Substack. What a lovely little community! It’s like a cross between Live Journal, Tumblr and Facebook status’s from the early 2000s. I’m into it.

Just to say, I am also an award-winning (ahem) writer of other things but that’s not what you can expect if you subscribe to this little newsletter. I will not be using Substacks as an attempt at self-promotion for my various spec scripts (for that, I direct you to my standup).

Photo Credit: Rachel Sherlock

If you’d like to see what sort of pieces I’ll be including, maybe check out the bits I wrote for Balance Garden in 2019…. musings on my own day-to-day experiences that somehow reflect what’s going on in the world; like a thinly veiled pieces of conceptual theatre smushed into a lifestyle blog. Imagine all that but 5 years later, post-pandemic, new career, new husband, freshly moved out of London to a seaside Sussex town with exactly one good pub and a lot of fishing, wondering how we could possibly afford to have a baby in this economy. It’s all standard stuff - or it would be if I wasn’t still working as an entertainer, touring up and down the country, staying in Budget Ibis hotel rooms and drinking dry the M&S tinnies section at most good train stations.

I wore big black boots for my wedding, like an absolute champ.

Things I’ve been thinking about lately: why everyone is obsessed with Trad Wives (even the lefties, why is that?); the death of community (all we have left is Gilmore Girls, hippie communes and village cheese rolling competitions); what it feels like to be a heavily masked neurodiverse queen and for no one to take you seriously, apart from Jeff at Access to Work; and if the standup industry had official funding from the Arts Council, maybe the club circuit would have to start behaving itself?

There will also be, of course, show and tour announcements, content sharing and whatnot, but I promise it will be done the right way - casually slid in at the end.