I’m thirty-five years old.
In fact in less than a month, present-buying fans, I will turn thirty-six.
And today I’m giddy with excitement because we’re off to see Ironman 3.
Having had a conversation – at first jokingly, and later with more seriousness – about the merits of going to see the showing at one minute past midnight because we were both rather excited about the whole thing, but then dismissing it as a silly idea because no-one’s brain is ready to process 3D images at just after the beginning of the Witching Hour and we’d only have about three hours of post-Ironman-comedown sleep before we had to get up for work, we decided that we should go in the evening like civilised people.
Which then, of course, meant I had to get home from work.
And what I’ve discovered, and created a hypothesis for, is that the more excited I am for something that is happening in the evening outside work, the harder it is for me to get home.
Last year a similar situation arose with seeing Sarah Millican in Halifax. I was excited to see her, but having seen the show earlier in the tour, I was not as excited as if it was completely fresh to me. But even so, my excitement permeated into the rail network and caused one Halifax-bound train to break down completely and another to run incredibly slowly and be late. It also caused a woman in M&S to not charge me for a sandwich, though, so I guess it has its upsides.
But today the excitement levels are a lot higher. I’ve heard some very good things about the film and, of course, I’m eager to see what little post-credits nugget is lurking out there (in theory something about Thor seeing as it’s the next movie, but who knows) so my excitement spilt over into the public transport system and, well, effectively wiped all buses that I would need to use from the fabric of existence.
I left work, I just missed a bus. There should be another one in ten minutes. It didn’t exist. I walk up to the train station. A train comes and there are suspiciously few problems with it. If anything, it’s actually early when it arrives in Halifax. I hot-foot it to Sainsbury’s where I catch my bus home from. I have time to kill so nip in and buy the Hairy Biker’s Curry Cookbook. I go outside to wait for the bus.
The bus doesn’t come.
My entire carefully planned night starts to crumble around me. I would have had only forty minutes from getting home to leaving for the cinema. And now I can’t get home, which means I will have less minutes. And no-one wants to go to the cinema wearing what they’ve been festering in all day at work, do they? Do they?
So, I think, the next time I’m really looking forward to something (16th May, Mickey Flanagan) I’m just going to act casual about the whole thing? One of my favourite comedians? Yeah, I’m not bothered.
I just can’t take the chance…