S3 EP22: Russell Howard

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Speaker 4 Podcasts, there are millions of them. Some might say too many.
I have one already. I don't have any because there are enough.
Politics, business, sport, you name it.

Speaker 4 There's a podcast about it, and they all ask the big questions and cover the hot topics of the day. But nobody is covering the most important topic of all.
Why is that? Are they scared?

Speaker 4 Too afraid of being censored by the man?

Speaker 4 Possibly, but not us. We're here to ask the only question that matters.
We'll try and say it at the same time, Max. What did you do yesterday? What did you do yesterday? What did you do yesterday?

Speaker 4 That's it. All we're interested in is what the guest got up to yesterday, nothing more.
Day before yesterday, Max? Nope. The greatest and most interesting day of your life?

Speaker 4 Unless it was yesterday, we don't want to know about it. I'm Max Rushton.
And I'm David O'Doherty. Welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday?

Speaker 4 Hello, and welcome to today's episode of What Did You Do Yesterday? I'm Max Rushton. He is David O'Doherty.
And today, David,

Speaker 4 someone that I have been gigging with for the past two days. Oh, God.

Speaker 4 The 1999 Channel 4 So You Think Your Funny Newcomer Comedy Final involved... quite a few guests that we have had.
It was me and Josie Long were in it.

Speaker 4 Andy Zoltzman was in it, who's going to come on this one soon. Jimmy Carr is in it.
And today's guest, Russell Howard. Russell Howard.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Who really got massive. Got massive around

Speaker 4 like we were all did Edinburgh every year and then has had tremendous success touring the world. And when he does a world tour, it's an actual world tour.

Speaker 4 His brand new stand-up show is called Don't Tell the Algorithm and tours across the UK and Ireland from the 22nd of January to the 29th of November, including six dates at the Palladium. Whoa.

Speaker 4 And Russell Howard's Five Brilliant Things podcast episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays through all the podcast platforms.

Speaker 4 Check out the episode where the guest is David O'Doherty and see if it in fact tallies with me and Max's favorite things to do with each letter of the alphabet. That's what I was going to say.

Speaker 4 I don't want to accuse Russell Howard of plagiarism, but five brilliant things, you know, is about things that you love.

Speaker 4 That does sound a lot like the A to Set of Things You Like. And he may say that he has been doing that podcast a lot longer than we

Speaker 4 have been doing the Azet of Things We Like, but I still think it's an issue. But I didn't want to bring it up with him at the time.

Speaker 4 Legally, I think what really undermines your argument is the fact that I did his one over a year ago, which is over a year before we started doing our

Speaker 4 not version of it, but things that some people could say it's an open shut case, but I'm not convinced. No, I really like this day.

Speaker 4 I will say I don't want to give up too much away, but there is too much coffee, but it's the most family day

Speaker 4 we've had so far. Yeah.
And it sounds like some family. That's what I would say.
Yes.

Speaker 4 And the fact that this comes out on a Sunday and then Russell Sunday or day is a Sunday, people will be able to compare their Sunday along with... We'll recreate it.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 To go to bath. We won't say anything else.
This is what Russell Howard did yesterday.

Speaker 4 Russell Howard, welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday? Hello, everybody. Dave, we've met many, many times.
Max, have we met? Oh,

Speaker 4 did you come on soccer AM during the glory? I didn't. 08 to 15.
Never. No.
Let me just tell you what happened. What happened?

Speaker 4 Last February, because I looked this up, Max was in his local cafe in Melbourne, and this guy came in. Max was like, who the hell is that?

Speaker 4 That's Russell Howard. Oh, wow.
And you both locked eyes like across. And I was like, you should have said hello to him because, you know, he's good for a chat.

Speaker 4 And there's many things you could talk about, even if you didn't know each other.

Speaker 4 And you both sat there, I'm going to imagine in an empty like coffee shop, just staring off into the same booth, same booth, like Pacino and De Niro. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So I am really having a go at him. You should have just said hello to him.
I mean, come on. What's life about if not just, you know, talking to strangers?

Speaker 4 And at the very end of the podcast, well, let's check if he's in Melbourne, and maybe he had a gig there that night.

Speaker 4 Maybe I could organize a ticket for you, Max, to go and see him if he's on tomorrow night. You were in Bergen in Norway, it was a completely different wow, so suddenly it's fine.

Speaker 4 Do you know the tricky thing with stuff like that is, and I've said this a few times, it's one of the few things that I can say with utter confidence is that arrogance and shyness look exactly the same.

Speaker 4 And that's the problem. So this kind of version of me must have been giving off 50-50 arrogance confidence where you're like, oh, God, do I?

Speaker 4 I've been in that situation so many times where it's people I like. Like, the only time I pushed through it, I met Jürgen Klopp in Australia.
I was looking out of my window. I was on holiday.

Speaker 4 Just before that, I thought I saw Max Roxton, but I thought I'm a bit of message.

Speaker 4 But I saw Klopp and just, I knew it was him from behind because I'm so used to the way he walks from watching him at Liverpool.

Speaker 4 And I just kind of burst out and just ran after him with no shoes on kind of just because I knew that in 10 minutes I would be kicking myself and then I had this kind of lovely but slightly peculiar conversation with Joe Kinklop because I had no shoes on and the the concrete on the floor was fucking roasting and his wife was like are you okay because I was quite kind of hopping yeah I'm hopping around I was like, yeah, yeah, it's nice to meet my hero.

Speaker 4 Can we do it in the shade? I will say that you weren't giving up off really welcoming vibes in the cafe. I will say that.
But I think to blame him for that is officially too much.

Speaker 4 I can't blame the other guy, can I? You can't be responsible for everyone that looks a bit like you. It's too much of a load to carry through your life.

Speaker 4 But what's lovely as well is that the guy that looks like me now has a really strange opinion of you, Max. That he's like, I tell you what, you know that Max Rushdon? Fuck, he's intense.

Speaker 4 I went for a Frappuccino and he's eyeballing me. I think he was mouthing, do I know you? I was doing lots of nuts.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 The other thing we have established in recent times is Max looks exactly like on this morning, the consumer goods guy who tells you what temperature to wash your clothes at looks exactly like Max.

Speaker 4 So there's a chance he was sitting there being, is that Alexander von Hugenholt over there? And he was about to ask you what spin and whether to use bio or non-bio. Yeah, you've got that look.

Speaker 4 You look, you could be a housewife's favorite and you could sell vulnerable women lots of shit they don't need. People do often come up and say, is finished quantum really worth this few counts?

Speaker 4 Anyway, we need to get down to business, Russell. What time did you wake up yesterday morning, please? Seven o'clock.
Seven o'clock, okay. Yes, I heard my son rising.

Speaker 4 Yes, so that's what woke me up because my wife done the the overnight on the on radio too, on BBC Radio Shops here. She's done overnights.

Speaker 4 She's moonlight and

Speaker 4 So she was looking after my son in the evening, and then I was on like early morning kind of duty.

Speaker 4 So we were in a hotel in Bath, and we went straight to our little kind of sofa area and got out the transformer toys, and the truck toy, and the digger toy, and the snake that he bought in the day of a plastic one, and a jigsaw.

Speaker 4 7 a.m. How old is this child? He's 15 months old.
Yeah. 15 months.
Okay. 7 a.m.
is good. As someone with a three and a half year old and a nine month old,

Speaker 4 I would dream of 7 a.m. Well, I see your 7 a.m.
rise, which you're agreed is fantastic. But in the last three weeks, he just gets lonely at night.
And we've all been there.

Speaker 4 But he has. He's got a chat line.

Speaker 4 He calls an escort. You're like, come on, mate.

Speaker 4 But he has the option where he can just stand up in his bed and cry for his dad. And I've never had that option in life.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 4 I could call for him but it's it's about like putting up the bat signal Gotham has no bat bat so yeah so he kind of he just wants company and now we've got this kind of mattress by his cot this is us obviously in our house not the hotel and it's like this very thin mattress that you sort of lie against and you put your hand through and you sort of stroke him and try and tap him to sleep but he now wants to be on that mattress with me and he's now pushed me off the mattress so i'm very much the diaprio to his winslet

Speaker 4 So I've been sleeping like on the floor on the regular for like the past three weeks, like a drug dealer that's hit the mattresses.

Speaker 4 And then when seven o'clock comes around, my wife goes to work and I go to bed until I get up for 10 o'clock to do a podcast. Okay.
She explains why I'm on the very edge of sanity.

Speaker 4 You can't criticize the lad because he's 15 months. No, no, no, I'm not criticizing the lad.
Come on. No, I'm criticizing.

Speaker 4 It's just, it's something that would really bothered me in maybe five or six years' time, which is crossing genres of toys like where i'd have star wars men and someone would involve a transformer in that right like this joker is bringing a snake in with transformers and it's like these are completely different things yeah what i would say that's on me then that's an absolute buffet of kind of sensory applications it's like this this this this this so i can kind of just watch him play with his toys the funny thing is he can open his transformer and i can't, which really makes me feel bad.

Speaker 4 There's a button in it that I can't, I have no idea. And then he'll click it and then it turns into a man.
This is the problem, Russell. The transformers are so modern.

Speaker 4 It's an air fryer that turns into a robot. And you're like, we did not have that in my day.

Speaker 4 So were you very much a play with one thing at a time kind of a guy? Do you eat like, you know, if you eat like a breakfast in the morning, is it bacon first and then beans and then potatoes?

Speaker 4 Because a friend of mine from university did that and I found it endlessly entertaining. I couldn't not watch it.
I found it. So hang on.
He he would never sort of like put two things on the floor.

Speaker 4 Ever, he would go, never, it was wild, yeah, exactly. So, you're the same as me, Mac.
So, I would just watch it, just going, he's gonna slip up, surely. But he would keep everything separate.

Speaker 4 Let's say he would eat all the bacon, then he would eat the sausages, then he would eat the beans, then he would eat the black pudding, and then he would eat the toast.

Speaker 4 And there would be nothing in between, and like that for all meals, he'd have his chips, then he'd have his steak, and then he'd have his mushroom. But how would he approach a trifle?

Speaker 4 Like, I mean, there are occasions where it's really hard.

Speaker 4 What an extraordinary heckle that would have been that was almost atom boresque it was like it was a documentary how would he approach a trifle

Speaker 4 he'd get a samurai sword and come at him from the side he probably would have been that scooper he would have been that guy that would have just kind of made his way along and then just kind of yeah back to your question sorry and i know we're at 7 a.m and we have to get through another 15 hours but i was a big masters of the universe man, but the main person I ended up playing with was my cousin Kleana, who was around a lot and it was fine, but she was terrible for two characters would be having a fight and one of them, she would just jump him or her 30 or 40 feet, the equivalent of 30 or 40 feet in the air.

Speaker 4 The realism was just lost. Yeah, like Stratos was the one master of the universe who could fly because he had sort of hairy feathered arms, but the rest of them were just normal people.

Speaker 4 Oh, no, no, no ram man could jump really high couldn't he so she maybe she had ram man ram man and strados were the only two that had those powers but she's trying to jump with man at arms or someone like that it's bullshit max it's bullshit i once went to alton towers and there was a guy who looked the spitting image of ram man

Speaker 4 i was like 18. that's fucking ram man

Speaker 4 it was crazy big flat head okay so it's seven o'clock he's got these toys Are you down there? Are you sort of like... I'm on the floor.
Are you on the floor? You know, you are fully there.

Speaker 4 You're fully parenting. You're not like on the phone checking the scores and like doing other stuff.

Speaker 4 I mean, listen, I'd be a liar if I didn't say I briefly checked to see how I was doing in my fantasy football league because I played my bench boost this week. It's gone pretty well.

Speaker 4 And I'm four points behind Bizarrely, my friend Dave, that I mentioned earlier, who eats in a very specific way. His 13-year-old son is top of our league, but I have him in my sights.

Speaker 4 So yeah, I briefly check that, and then I'm kind of on the floor. I'm kind of one of those dads at the minute.

Speaker 4 I've just done loads of reading about phones, and I'll have my little check, see where I am, and then playing Transformers and the jigsaw.

Speaker 4 Dave's undoing from a fantasy football point of view is that one week he plays all

Speaker 4 defenders, yeah.

Speaker 4 He just needs there to be consistency, that's all he asks for. What's the puzzle for a 15-month? It's a thousand-piece seascape.
What is it?

Speaker 4 It's probably a 15 piece i guess there's a giraffe there is a lion uh and there's an elephant there's a spider my son's favorite my son loves spiders and you just take them off and then put them back so yeah that's the jigsaw the digger he's also a fan of that loves buses loves them in the street this week we've had four waves and three honks from buses so um it's going well that's the stage i'm at i'm waving at buses with my son and that's not like a contest it's not like waves four honks three like waves are one up.

Speaker 4 We're very much a team, you know. Again, I am leading this, but he likes waving at them.
And then if we wave hard enough, you can get a honk, which feels electric. It really does.

Speaker 4 Like instantly, you get it. You understand why they brave any kind of weather just for that

Speaker 4 from a train. I get it.
I'm fully on board. Oh, yeah.
Okay, so how long do we spend with the toys just engaging? We play with the toys for a bit.

Speaker 4 I would say for probably about 40 minutes, and then we might read a book. I'm keeping him entertained until my wife kind of gets up because she had done the overnight at the hotel.

Speaker 4 But my wife has a proper job, so gets up at a normal hour, even if she's kind of, you know, done loads of overnight care with him. So she probably gets up, maybe it's eight.

Speaker 4 I'll have changed his nappy, got him into his clothes. So he's ready for the day.
And then this takes us to eight o'clock when we've arranged a meet up with my mum and dad. Yes.
The Howards.

Speaker 4 Welcome to the the howards this is lovely for breakfast yeah so it's like a family day where we're meeting my sister's new boyfriend for the first time whoa a breakfast this is good not a breakfast christ jesus yeah no that's an afternoon meal so this is the breakfast beforehand because my mum and dad want to see my son so we get in his in his outfit we put his little fox hat on that kind of ties under his chin and we hit the mean streets of bath and we hit it hard and we're out there i'd say by 759.

Speaker 4 question tell me what when you're 15 15 months, do you have strong opinions as to what clothes you want to wear for the day?

Speaker 4 Are there certain clothes where you're like, absolutely not, under no circumstances? No, no, he's, to use an Irish phrase, he'd happily be in the nip.

Speaker 4 Now I understand. He has to have clothes.
He's not particularly keen on having clothes put upon him. At this stage, he's not a fashionist.
Got it.

Speaker 4 Look, we should say for the take, we're recording on a Monday, so this is a rare weekend day. It's exciting to have a weekend day.
We don't often have weekend days.

Speaker 4 And we're away as well it's we're out we're in a hotel so you've left the hotel so have you eschewed the hotel breakfast because you know that is the joy of a hotel

Speaker 4 well this is it the hotel breakfasts are broadly speaking incredibly poor as David will attest and having toured like all over the world now if you're kind of in an area there's something lovely about doing a little google search where's the best breakfast and then just kind of finding a little kind of cool cafe to go there so that's the plan so we go to a place called cafe au au lait which is opposite the train station it's very very nice it's also one of the few cafes that's open at eight o'clock on a sunday morning so you know double tick yeah yeah we get in we're all ready to go we have a baby seat please they don't have a baby seat oh

Speaker 4 that's a shattering blow so now it's 8 07 and the world has caved in so we then go back to the hotel to have the hotel breakfast. Right, I see.
And your parents are with you. It's the whole family?

Speaker 4 Yes, it's my mum and dad and my wife and my son. And to complicate things further, my dad has now been on, my mum has torn her meniscus of late.
So she's been on quite the stroll.

Speaker 4 And my dad is recovering from his third broken hip, having fallen off a bike down a Spanish mountain three times. The same fucking mountain.
What? So it's all going on.

Speaker 4 So we're kind of, you know, my wife's barely slept. I feel like I'm jetnagged for shit.
My son's waving a snake and they're behind us like Kaiser Soze, just dragging their bits.

Speaker 4 To be honest, they may very well have had the baby seat, but they just took one look at the glue sniffers and were like, nah, man.

Speaker 4 Nah.

Speaker 4 We don't know, but baby seat is a clear sort of fuck off sign whereby. I know, because they were kind of young and hip.
I think they just get so busy that they just don't need babies and families.

Speaker 4 Do you know what I mean? It's quite small in their defense.

Speaker 4 It's a really lovely cafe and the food's amazing. But it is that thing where you go, ah, just one.

Speaker 4 Come on.

Speaker 4 But it's all, you know, when you sometimes go to like a sushi restaurant and it's kind of all, everything is well apportioned, and a seat somewhere outside of the kind of booth would knacker everything.

Speaker 4 It's kind of got that vibe. Can I just check on your parents? When are they going to be back in training? Maniscus is, you know, mum's out for three months.
Yeah. Dad, third broken hip.

Speaker 4 You've got to wonder if he will ever get the pace that he's lost.

Speaker 4 This is it. You can't lose that, Max.
You cannot lose it.

Speaker 4 My dad is refusing to retire from the game. My mum was never really in the game.
I mean, my mum was kind of quite how she tore a meniscus. I mean, nobody really knows.

Speaker 4 She was delighted to know she had a meniscus, to be honest.

Speaker 4 I think she said she was going up the stairs and kind of tore it. And my dad is just, I don't know.
I don't understand it. But he just loves, well, Dave will get it.
He kind of, and I presume,

Speaker 4 are you two bonded over cycling? Me? You two.

Speaker 4 I mean, I have one bike and it gets me places. So I do.
I mean, I really appreciate the worth of a bicycle, but I do not have Stephen Roach's 1987.

Speaker 4 My dad loves it. It's wild.
Yeah. You'd love him, Dave.
But it's just kind of Owl's dad now, 72, and he just loves it. So he's just always on these.

Speaker 4 But the problem is, once you break your hip three times in the same sort of mountain in Spain, you know, where you've had to literally drag yourself up it like Daniel Day-Lewis and there will be blood.

Speaker 4 Surely the same voice in your head goes, ah, I think I'm out. If touching the void had happened three times

Speaker 4 where he crawls back to base camp and he goes, It's happened again. And then the third time, they'd really be like, Maybe you're just doing mountaineering wrong, to be honest.

Speaker 4 My dad has a bit of that kind of free solo vibe about him where you kind of just can't tell somebody, maybe you should stop that, maybe take up bowling, or because you're just putting a full stop on their life.

Speaker 4 He just, that's who he is. Sure, yeah.
What's funny about it is that everyone instantly has deep feelings for my dad. They go, oh my God, your dad broke his hip.

Speaker 4 And yet, all of my family are, we're now at a stage where, yeah, he's a fucking idiot. Like, because it's happened so often.
So, our reaction is so insane to everyday reaction.

Speaker 4 So, it's kind of nice to hear both of you going, so when's your dad going to stop? Because most people are like, oh my God,

Speaker 4 third hip injury. That's so terrible.
Is he okay? I'm just wondering, is it the same corner? Like, is there a corner now called, you know, Howard's Hip? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 It's quite a good name for a corner of a man. You know, it's a tough part of the course.
Yeah. Hang on, Max.
You can't talk because you continue to play for the Melbourne All Boys football team.

Speaker 4 And as you tell me after every match, there's an audible bone on bone sound as you make one of your dreadful runs through the middle. Oh, yeah.
So it's not like you're learning lessons here either.

Speaker 4 I'm aware of the hypocrisy, but yeah, I couldn't live without it. But I'm much like Russell's mum.
I'm one meniscus down. And, you know, that does affect things.
We could bond on this.

Speaker 4 Okay, so look, we're at the cafe. That was a Ben Fold song, wasn't it? Want Maniska's down.

Speaker 4 So we're at the cafe. We're all.
No, we're back at the hotel. We're back at the hotel.
My apologies, yeah. We're at the hotel.
So is that a buffet situation or is it? They take your order.

Speaker 4 It's a buffet and an order. It's steep, which is another reason we didn't kind of go £40

Speaker 4 for your buffet. £40

Speaker 4 per head. Yeah.

Speaker 4 For a basic buffet. But we get my son his Wheatabix, get his toast.
£40. That is the most expensive Wheatabix ever, isn't it? Yeah, I don't even know if he, if we had to pay for him.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, we get him his Wheatabix, get him his toast, get some fruit. Then my wife diligently goes to work on stealing so that we've got food for my son for the rest of the day.
Right.

Speaker 4 She went full Napoleon dynamite. You know what I mean? Pockets were bulging, man.
There were tots coming up.

Speaker 4 She puts her hat down over the big thing with all of the sausages in it and just clips the whole thing and unplugs it and spreads out.

Speaker 4 My favorite story for that, for overextending your kind of privileges at the buffet.

Speaker 4 We had the magnificent John Barnes on my uh show years ago, and I said, Oh, you know, we're chatting afterwards, and I'm a Liverpool fan, so it's, you know, it's just thrilling to kind of be chatting with him.

Speaker 4 I said, Oh, do you want a sandwich or anything? We had all this kind of buffet, and he took one of the big circular fucking

Speaker 4 he took the whole thing, and then just because it was John Barnes, and he did it with such confidence, I just couldn't. So it was

Speaker 4 forever.

Speaker 4 It was magnificent. It was just like, there goes goes my hero.
And he's just walking out with, I'd say, about 30 sandwiches. The John Barnes platter.
That's so good.

Speaker 4 You know, you have to respect that. And then everyone kind of comes down.
They're like, where's the food that John Barnes has taken?

Speaker 4 It's also like, if all the sandwiches have gone, it's great if you could say, John Barnes has stolen them. You go, well, fair enough.
Exactly. I like, there was one Super Sunday where he was a pundit.

Speaker 4 And then I can't remember, it's probably Richard Keys was like, and the good news is your wife is in labor. So thanks so much for coming.
And he went, I'll just stay for the second half. Oh, wow.

Speaker 4 And you're like, okay, good stuff, John.

Speaker 4 yeah what are you having what's your breakfast russell i had yesterday a salmon eggs benedict and i believe it's an is that an eggs royale i think i haven't had one of those for ages my tour manager the mighty kumar kamalagaran that's his go-to he'll have an eggs benedict ideally with bacon this is his order it would be uh eb s o s n b which is eggs benedict sausage on the side no bullshit doesn't like any of the frills and anything like that so i just went for uh smoked salmon benedict, and it was incredible.

Speaker 4 A little bit of Hollandaise, it was really tasty. I don't know if it was worth 40 quid, but it was all

Speaker 4 because of the sheer number of breakfast buffets you have been to. Have you trained your mind not to go back and get six pano chocolas right at the very end?

Speaker 4 You know, the stuff that really makes you uncomfortably full and kind of undermines the rest of the breakfast.

Speaker 4 The problem is there were no croissants left because Robbie Fowler had been in earlier and he tasted all the stuff.

Speaker 4 I'm a bit weird with my eating, really, so I kind of.

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Speaker 4 I'm a bit like, you know that bit in Dodgeball? You know when he kind of sniffs the food to kind of make sure they eat like, I'm sort of that really.

Speaker 4 I can't indulge in stuff like that because I would eat six of them. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, Dave will attest, when I first sort of started, I was quite like round and tubby and I kind of used to eat a a mutual friend of ours, the brilliant comedian Daniel Kitson, kept me very well fed.

Speaker 4 I think when I was about like 25, I just like started kind of like looking after myself a bit. So I have to kind of avoid foods.
This all feels very serious and weird. But do you know what I mean?

Speaker 4 It's that thing where I go, I look at him, I go, oh, God, I love that. If I have one bite, it's...
Oh, I don't have a valve. I don't have a valve.
Like, I just don't stop.

Speaker 4 And Jamie fills the house with chocolate. And it's, I say, can you not buy any? And then I get some.

Speaker 4 But one of the weirdest things she thinks about me is I sniff everything before I eat it or drink it really I just sniff food but that's an important part of taste I think you must have been like a royal tester yeah

Speaker 4 the previous life yeah look I am As Max has heard so much about Russell I'm trying to be healthy at the moment and one of the main factors in that is this stupid static bike behind me and you ride up fake mountains against divorced Belgian dentists.

Speaker 4 Your dad rustle himself on the floor. You cycle past.

Speaker 4 He's just on the floor screaming, go on, go on without me.

Speaker 4 You see how many calories you've burned. So you've been cycling for fucking ages and you see that you've used up less than one Mars bar of energy.

Speaker 4 And then I feel that's good for me, who in the past would have been like, go on, have a double decker. Whereas now I know how much effort it takes to burn that off.
Here's something very interesting.

Speaker 4 If you want to get into it, there's a thing called anaerobic exercise, which is basically, so your aerobic exercise, you're zone two, Dave, that kind of keeps you on an even keel.

Speaker 4 But if you do sort of hit training and stuff like that, you burn calories post.

Speaker 4 So then you might also be able to sneak a little miles bar in. This does sound now like a high performance podcast.
Yeah, it does. It does.
I know, exactly. Stop this.

Speaker 4 I'll just say one more bit on this. So, I did it last night, and I actually did some of that.
I had a heart monitor on.

Speaker 4 So, I bumped up four times, had a shower, and then was still sweating so much post-shower that I sat beside Helen in the nude on the couch and just dripped on her. So, I think that's a very positive.

Speaker 4 As my coach, coach, that's good, right? Oh, massively, massively. So, so is this your setup then? Is this your bedroom, Dave? This is my spare room.

Speaker 4 If the weather is okay, I go for a real cycle.

Speaker 4 But, say, if I have a gig or something that means that there's no time for a real cycle, then I get on this, just a very basic, it's a real bike mounted on a thing.

Speaker 4 And I don't love it, but I listen to podcasts while I'm doing it. And it's better than nothing.
You know what I mean? Yes, yes, amen. How's the chat at breakfast? Is it just edutaining the child?

Speaker 4 How's the career going, Russell? Is there any of that?

Speaker 4 no no no none of that really we're just it's all about my son so he's kind of um my mum is and my dad in fairness they just love him so they're just kind of doting on him and pulling faces so my dad is really into getting my son to poke his tongue out yeah and he's been successful with that so my dad pulls faces at my son my son will occasionally throw a raspberry on the floor my dad for some reason picked the raspberry up put it back in my son's bowl and i took the raspberry out of my son's bowl and put it over there because I could feel my wife she's very very calm but just go

Speaker 4 so my hand was already in going

Speaker 4 question is there any chat about oh so we're gonna meet you know your brother's new girlfriend let's hope she's better than the last few you know with his track record hints her movement yeah you find out what he does I'm gonna find out what his relationship like is with his family and whether he hasn't had many exes before do all of the Howards come at it a different way No, it was very little of that, to be honest.

Speaker 4 We kind of, I think my mum and dad have met him before and think he's lovely. So my brother and his girlfriend and my sister's two kids, my sister and her fella, me, my wife, my son, mum and dad.

Speaker 4 So we're all kind of, it's like the first time we're all kind of getting together. It's like his coming out.
Do you know what I mean? It's sort of that. So that's taking place at two o'clock.

Speaker 4 But really, we're just, we're chatting about, what are we chatting about? We're chatting mostly about my son. My brother's having his house renovated.
So, and he's doing a lot of it himself.

Speaker 4 He's also doing a lot of batch cooking. And he's been telling my mum about that.
He cooked a butter chicken the other day for 15, and that's now in the freezer. So it's pretty low-level chat.

Speaker 4 It's that kind of stuff. And lots of, he likes snakes, didn't he? Yeah, he does.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 My mum is extraordinary. So we have our breakfast and we go for a little walk.
Again, this is very difficult for my dad. So get ready for this.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 So my dad goes, oh, I'm going going to nip home because they live just outside of Bath. So, he's going to nip home because he's got to do some gardening that has to be done, apparently.

Speaker 4 So, my dad nips home on his motorbike

Speaker 4 because they've traveled separately.

Speaker 4 My mum is in a car, my dad is on a motorbike, which, you know, if there's anyone listening who's had three broken hips, like right in the top of that, you know, in kind of in the rehab is make sure you run a motorbike as soon as possible it's just like it's it's the perfect way to travel i struggle though to imagine in gardening something that like is he the man from del monte and at this exact moment he just he picks one orange off the tree and nods and all of his workers just cheer and start shaking the crop into blankets I don't know what it is.

Speaker 4 It's just this, you know, it's like a target.

Speaker 4 He's got loads of bulbs and I've got to plant these bulbs before, you know, the seasons change because then they'll become flowers and he's basically an exhausted god in his garden you know what i mean he knows if his creation is at its zenith he can't rest on the seventh day

Speaker 4 when we started this podcast i always knew this is when people would be going i have for years wanted to know about russell howard's dad's garden and now finally it's getting the airtime that it deserves so right dad's gone mum's there kids there wife's there right so where are we here roman bath do you go to the roman bath we do we go past the roman bath because my mum says that there's a special place where you can have a little party just a group of you in the thermos bar and i'm like that's nonsense i don't believe you we walk past it she's right this is a tiny little hot tub that you can see through the street where you can have kind of parties and and my wife is like well that's pretty weird because you better see in and mum's like you can cover it over

Speaker 4 So we're having that chat. My mum is telling us they're trying to sell their house.

Speaker 4 They're not sure if they're going to be able to sell it because of the kind of, you know rachel reeves you know the property market all feels a bit weird we're talking again about my son liking spiders my mum said that she saw a spider the other day on her stairs and she jumped and it didn't help her meniscus any no and then she wondered whether or not the spider was scared of her do spiders get scared of humans who knows and my wife looks at me with a look i've come to know

Speaker 4 which is coffee please

Speaker 4 this is all day isn't it she's going this is all day. Oh, I love this.
You know, it's got that kind of the spy funny things, isn't they?

Speaker 4 Spy, you must get very annoyed because we walk through their webs all the time, and that's their house. They're like, oh, God, imagine that.

Speaker 4 If your house broke down, you had to make a new one with your ass. You're like, yeah,

Speaker 4 you know, and it's charming and it's, you know, it's on the edges. You know, so my dad's on his motorbike going home.
We're walking around bath. Then I've been embarrassing about other people.

Speaker 4 So I'll be embarrassing about myself. Suddenly, the coffee I've had kicks in.
And I don't know whether this is an aging thing. And my mum's got a voice that carries.
I say, I need a movement.

Speaker 4 What do you mean you need a movement?

Speaker 4 Shut the fuck up.

Speaker 4 I'm just going to nip an ear. So I go into a place I used to live in Bath when I was younger.
So out of like nostalgia, I go back into a cafe I used to shit in called same, same, but different.

Speaker 4 I would also eat in there. And, you know, you can't shit where you eat.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 It was like an old haunt I used to go into and I used to really like writing in there. So it was kind of like a nice trip down memory lane.

Speaker 4 And then I come outside, and my mum goes, What have you got that? I've got another coffee. She goes, Why have you got that? That's what caused this trouble in the first place.

Speaker 4 And I was like, Well, yeah, but I couldn't, you know, just nip in. She's like, I suppose, yeah, Russell Harrod off the TV comes in for a shit.
And you're like, Yeah, all right, stop.

Speaker 4 So it's pretty full-on. Now, by this time, so hang on, question.
Question, Russell.

Speaker 4 I mean, because it's not often that I will nip in somewhere to take a shit, and my whole family are waiting outside for me. Does that like put pressure on?

Speaker 4 Yes, yeah, I'm pretty efficient.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and i should stress this wasn't like there was no luxury here this was ow ow you know what i mean this is of course we've been on the boat but we're storming the beaches now

Speaker 4 of all the the

Speaker 4 i would say the obvious

Speaker 4 i was drinking them mate

Speaker 4 i nearly went everywhere sorry the on street or off street post coffee one the evacuation exactly is in fairness to the lads sometimes they're straight out there's very little to even tend to afterwards.

Speaker 4 No, but if your family are waiting out, it's just like an odd situation when the whole family, and that's not the extended family, applaud.

Speaker 4 They applaud and you have to bring it out in a little bag and show it to them. You're right.
It's not ideal.

Speaker 4 And to quote my mum, I should have gone before I left, but I didn't. And the day moves on.
So at this point, I guess we're at like half 10.

Speaker 4 We walk past our hotel and mum says, I think I'll go home too. And then I'll get ready and I'll come back later.

Speaker 4 So we go back to the hotel. We play with my son a bit more, and he's doing lots of kind of like running and not running, but kind of scampering about and stuff like that, burning off loads of energy.

Speaker 4 He's being chased a lot by me. And then once he's into the warm embrace of my wife, he can't be touched.
Those are the rules. He really likes that.
A lot of tickling. I'm a big fan of that.

Speaker 4 Has he got a nap coming up? Yes, this is it. So we're just pushing him so that he's super tired.
So his nap is is at 11.30, anywhere between normally 11.30 to sort of 2.30 around there.

Speaker 4 But today, because we've got this meal book for two, and then we have to then get the train at quarter to four

Speaker 4 to go back to London. I think, well, let's get the nap in at 11.
And then that way, he'll go to bed a bit earlier. Now, my son is not on board with this.

Speaker 4 So it's quite a tough half an hour of trying to kind of coax him to sleep. But he does this super cute.

Speaker 4 He like normally at home, you've you've got this kind of little sofa where you can kind of rock him but when he's in a hotel bed he kind of likes to slump next to me which is like adorable and he's just kind of like sort of got his head on me we call it in the business a big boy sleep so he's having a big boy sleep next to next to his dad eventually he goes to uh sleep and i kind of lift him up put him in the cot and then i kind of go outside we've got like this little two bedroom kind of interconnected kind of suite my wife is having a well-earned nap because she was up in the evening with my son.

Speaker 4 Meanwhile, we're at a spa hotel. She's asleep.
What does daddy do? Daddy goes downstairs to the saunter. That's what daddy does.
Wow. So, I mean, there's a risk there because the 15-month-old

Speaker 4 huge. Well, firstly, of all, like, putting him in the cot, that sounded quite easy because that can be like putting a grenade down.
You're cracking the safe.

Speaker 4 And what's funny about it is the older you get as well, I'm incredibly cat-handed. So it's kind of my wife will put him down.

Speaker 4 Have you ever seen like, well, you will have done but you know the way like burkamp would pull a bull down

Speaker 4 yeah it's sort of like that

Speaker 4 the foot and the ball are as one and you're like how do you do that she just has this sort of grace and i'm very much kind of like i've learnt to do it do you know what i mean it's kind of like very much uh ronaldo it's just kind of train yourself to do it this is the muscle memory and you whereas my wife is very much messy occasionally you do just like there's like a bang yeah you just walk them into a door on the way to the cot and then you're like they don't wake up and you're like get in, what a fucking result that is.

Speaker 4 I mean, sometimes at night, you're like crawling on all fours.

Speaker 4 We've got this light sensor that kind of goes, if there's any movement in his room, the kind of light comes on, very faint light, but enough of a light to kind of keep him up.

Speaker 4 So you just have to kind of lieutenant down it out and just crawl out. I also knew my wife had the kind of monitor upstairs because I could hear that sort of gentle hiss and she was asleep.

Speaker 4 And I knew he always sleeps for two hours during the day. I knew I was fine.
So I had a plan.

Speaker 4 Here's my plan. So my plan was to go down to the sauna and the steam room and this lovely little pool.
So I went down and I did that for half an hour. It was absolutely glorious.
Very hot.

Speaker 4 My fear would be this could be peak time. So you might be sitting with too many strangers in too intimate a place.
Does that happen? Yeah, that's exactly what happens.

Speaker 4 But there's lots of foreign people, which definitely helps.

Speaker 4 You know, so I just look like, you know, a little little German boy, essentially, because it's fine. And then there might be, you know, some of the guys that work there.

Speaker 4 There was this really great moment, so charming. This guy at the end of it, he goes, so what are you doing later? I was like, um, nothing really.
And he went, just got a freestyle.

Speaker 4 Like, I went, I doubt there'll be any freestyle. There was this pause, and he kind of went, I don't know why I said that.

Speaker 4 He's so self-aware and funny. And he had this sort of beautiful smile.
You know, when you go, it's it's that instant thing you go god you're charming do you know what i mean like he just

Speaker 4 he threw it out and i went about that and he instantly went why did i do that and we were all right

Speaker 4 so then i think right i've had half an hour of utter indulgence to myself i feel cleaned every orifice feels you know that lovely kind of post spa just steamed i feel good and then i think to myself right we're going on the train on the way home now we're going to have food at two but by the time we get to london it might be it's going to be 1808 because i've checked on my train line app so my son might need food so what i'd do is i'd nip to a marks and spencer's to get some white bread some chicken some philadelphia so i can make him like little sort of sandwiches whilst my wife is asleep i also get her a hot chocolate i get myself another coffee and i make my way back feeling just feeling so good about myself thinking yeah you've done well there but i've done it solely for the praise yeah you strip strip it back you're basically making a sandwich to feed your child but you are going look at me but this is the extraordinary sort of thing about being a dad something as small as that makes me look wonderful can you believe you made a sandwich like but I felt good and you know I felt like just going around marks and Spencer's I felt like a hunter and I was just like looking for all the stuff I needed and oh they don't have Philadelphia but they have their own brand I'll look that up on the yucca app which sees whether it's got too much salt for kids kids.

Speaker 4 Click, click. It's fine.
And on. Bam, bam, bam, bam.

Speaker 4 Felt great. Got back.
My son was just about to wake. We get him ready.
Question. By my calculations, you've had possibly five coffees at this point.

Speaker 4 Is this going to continue throughout the day, or do you have to draw a line under it at some point? Sort of taper off at about three. Question from me as well.

Speaker 4 Are you having the same coffee every time? Or? Yes, Black Americano. Yeah.
Okay, you're just Black Americano, all the like Jack Reacher. Oh, good.
I'm impressed with that. Okay, good.
Do carry on.

Speaker 4 So we get my son ready. I get a phone call from a spam account, which is frustrating.
I also get two phone calls from my dad.

Speaker 4 One of them is on FaceTime, which is extraordinary, given that he is, let me quote again, traveling on a motorbike.

Speaker 4 So I don't take either of those calls. I speak to my brother, who is in Bath with his girlfriend.
Is this the brother with the new girlfriend? Is this the no, no, no.

Speaker 4 So it's my sister has a sister and her new boyfriend, right? Okay, that's the hero. Yeah.
Okay, he's the star of the show, right? Okay. We get him ready, new clothes, get everything packed because

Speaker 4 we know as soon as the meal's finished, we have to go down to the bottom above, get the train to London. So everything is packed.
We're out the door, I think at 1.52.

Speaker 4 We get...

Speaker 4 to the restaurant 1.58.

Speaker 4 We order for my son immediately. What's he having? He's having Hake Fillet.
It was an Ivy. I know, know, it's ridiculous.
It's an Ivy restaurant. And we like, have you got the kids' menu?

Speaker 4 And you go, yeah. And he just really likes fish, but like, he's not really into like fish and chips.
So it was like a hake fillet was the kind of, you know, grilled fish.

Speaker 4 So he has that and a bit of tomato sauce. And one of his big boy sandwiches, if he needs, is just there.
What Russell's left out here is to intimidate the new boyfriend.

Speaker 4 They've all dressed as knights. Yeah.

Speaker 4 They're all talking in sort of medieval type stuff. Well, Russell is dressed dressed as Ram Man.
He did have some sort of chain mail thing. But hopefully the sister's boyfriend gets the reference.

Speaker 4 Otherwise, it's a lot of

Speaker 4 energy for nothing, isn't it? Is everyone on time? Is everyone there? Everyone is there. We're the latest there, but we're on time, so it's all fine.
I say hello to everybody.

Speaker 4 I say hello to my sister's fella. Oh, you should have iced him out.

Speaker 4 You should have just said, you know, in football where they shake hands with everyone in the line and then they leave one player and then shake hands with everyone else. I didn't do that.

Speaker 4 I thought I'd go in. He's very tall.
He's handsome. My sister seems very happy.
Her two kids are there. They're straight on me because they've been watching.
Well, one of them's 11.

Speaker 4 So he's been watching a travel show that I did with my mum. Oh, yeah.
He's only just started watching it because it's kind of a bit rude. And they've just thought, ah, he's fine.
He's 11.

Speaker 4 Suddenly I'm. hilarious and cool to him.
Yeah, so he's asking me about what it was like to be in Japan with mum and all this kind of stuff. So he's kind of wanting to know all these kind of stories.

Speaker 4 We're chatting away.

Speaker 4 And then I should point out as well, my sister's new fellow is from Melbourne.

Speaker 4 So instantly, it's like safe ground. I have loads to talk about.
And he's actually brought up in Essendon. So I say, ah, are you a fan of the Essendon bombers?

Speaker 4 Straight away, we're kind of into a nice chat. To the listeners, that's an Aussie Rules team, not a society where they fly old aeroplanes.
Yeah, yeah. He's also not a terrorist.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's not a sleeper cell in a suburb of Melbourne. But he seems very calm, but there's a lot going on.
It's kind of, so my dad is again trying to tickle my son and poke his tongue out.

Speaker 4 And my son's really like smiling and laughing. And everyone's like, really into him.

Speaker 4 And my brother's at the end of the table with his girlfriend just being hilarious and telling the I don't know how they got he's talking to the eight-year-old and the 11-year-old.

Speaker 4 He says, the only thing I'm guilty of, I just hear this, you know, when you hear a whip it, a snippet of a conversation. He says, the only thing I'm guilty of is being a lovable bastard.
Like that.

Speaker 4 So the 11-year-old and the eight-year-old are just like in hysterics because he's kind of sworn. And I loved it, but it's, there's a lot going on, and I'm kind of fatigued.

Speaker 4 And I'm also not, I know that I'm up against the clock because we've got to get home. So I'm trying to chat to my sister's fella as much as I can.
The 15-month-old,

Speaker 4 because this is quite a fancy restaurant, is the 15-month old just crawling around on the floor underneath the string quartet, you know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Trying to rugby tackle the posh waiters who have trays of negronis like the little Simpson lady. He's in his seat, his high seat.
They have one here, so it's a big tick and loves eating, so he's fine.

Speaker 4 He's a big fan of food.

Speaker 4 He's a good lad if he's sitting there for all of this. Fill it of hate.

Speaker 4 So does he say, actually, this is slightly overdone yeah exactly he's white wine a fish isn't it dad you know this over soul i'm sorry are you marketing hake as over soul does your wife enjoy this situation or is she like oh good question 345 which i think is a bit early i know you've got to get a kid home to sleep yeah but you know for a 2 p.m dinner is she like actually could we book the three o'clock or is she into it So I would say I'd book the 3.45 because we had to get him back for, again, because he's not sleeping.

Speaker 4 It's like paramount. We get him back for half six in bed, but we don't make that.
Obviously, he ends up going to bed at seven, but we're not to know this. My wife is brilliant and lovely.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's very much kind of, you know, I've got a very big family. This is just my little section of my wider family.
And it's like being in a pogue song. So there's a lot going on, right?

Speaker 4 There's a lot of fucking madness.

Speaker 4 So she's happy to kind of watch and observe. But there's a lot of kind of, you know, if there's a guy down the bottom saying that he's only guilt with being a lovable bastard,

Speaker 4 she was talking loads with my sister's new boyfriend. And how's he performed? Do you think? How do you think he's done, the new boyfriend? He's great.
He's very calm and he's interested.

Speaker 4 So, my wife's a doctor, he's asking her what kind of medicine she works in. And I think he works, well, he works, he's a tour guide.
So, we're asking him about that.

Speaker 4 And, you know, they just got back from Corfu, and you know, it's an interesting job to get into. And we're chatting about how great Melbourne is.

Speaker 4 And then it turns out his mum and dad now have retired and they now live in Noosa, which is an incredible part of Australia.

Speaker 4 But there isn't a moment where you look over and your brother is demonstrating to the Melbourne guy how to like strangle a dog to death.

Speaker 4 You know, one of those things where you have to rush over and be like, okay, just talk to mum again. No, that may very well have happened, but I love that.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Like, I kind of, it was always my favorite thing of part, like sort of Howard slash Veal parties down the years have been full of that. And it's kind of like you have to bump into a weird uncle.

Speaker 4 Like, I remember, and some of these sort of strange, funny men that I kind of met when I was younger. I don't even know if I'm related to them, but I loved, you know what I mean?

Speaker 4 I remember there's a guy called Chivers, who's like, it's really he's a butler, he's your butler, is he?

Speaker 4 Well, no, he's far from it, but he looks, he's my uncle Harry's mate, and he looks like, you know, like when Wes Anston did the fantastic Mr.

Speaker 4 Fox he's kind of got that little look he's like this tiny little bloke and he's drinking this cider and I'm probably my nephew's age I'm like nine or whatever and he goes I could drink three of these kill you and not know I'd done it like that and it was just like do you know what it's that kind of chat and I've always we would then talk about it with my family and it was one of my favorite things growing up was being with my wider family and then

Speaker 4 talking to my kind of my family is kind of quite a normal part of the bigger family about the crazy things we'd seen. So if my brother was doing that, I would very much be up for it.

Speaker 4 It's like the other day, honestly, so Daniel comes around my house and there's a dog bowl on our table because we have to have the dog bowl on the table because my son keeps putting his hands in it.

Speaker 4 So my brother,

Speaker 4 whilst looking at my son, who's also in his chair at the minute, starts drinking from the dog bowl.

Speaker 4 You know, just go,

Speaker 4 starts barking and drinking from the dog bowl. And I've made my son laugh, but the noises that were coming out of this kid, like it was another level where he's just going, Are you getting this?

Speaker 4 He's a dog, but he's also a human, and he's pretending to be.

Speaker 4 And he's like, I swear, it's a bit like if you've ever seen the audience when they're watching Jason Byrne in Edinburgh, it's that thing where they're just, yeah, you know, that

Speaker 4 like that lovely,

Speaker 4 I'm gonna shit myself. So he's in that realm, and I'm also laughing just because of the audacity of my brother just to back himself to go.

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Speaker 4 Right, what's the funniest thing to do? The funniest thing

Speaker 4 is to commit and to drink from the dog bowl, to look at the little boy, pretend I'm a dog. So, you know, it's five stars from me as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 4 So my wife comes in, she sees this, and she says, quite understandably, what the fuck are you doing?

Speaker 4 To which my brother says, maybe offer your guests a drink next time.

Speaker 4 And simply walks out of the room. That is my brother, really.
He can just do, he has this extraordinary ability where you've got him pinned. Like, what are you doing?

Speaker 4 But he can always twist out of it. I I remember doing a Zoom during COVID.
So loads of my cousins, we're all having a beer. Remember those early kind of

Speaker 4 best. It was so...
Yeah, they were fun. The first time you're like, wow, look at all these people.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 It was like community and it was just nice to see people I loved and we're having this shared experience and we're chatting away. Now I hear this noise in my brother's sort of like section.

Speaker 4 And I'm like, are you having a bath?

Speaker 4 And he's taken his laptop into the bath and he just looked at me and went, people wash, dickhead.

Speaker 4 Do you know when you've got him pinned? Like, I got him here, there's no way out of it. And I'm the bad guy for not having a wash.

Speaker 4 Question: You're leaving, presumably, before everyone else from this lunch, pretty much. So you've got a couple of options here.
Like, you're either saying,

Speaker 4 Look, tell me what I owe you, and I'll transfer it, or you're expecting dad to pay because, you know, family hierarchy, or the power play that you pay as you leave for the whole table.

Speaker 4 I'm interested, Russell. Well, I always pay, so I didn't pay.
And I texted my my sister, who I suspected was going to say that it was on her. I said, how much do we owe you?

Speaker 4 As we left, and she said, it's on me. Ooh.
So she bought the meal for everybody.

Speaker 4 I'm not calling out the Howards here, but there was a chance to do the really funny joke where you pretend that the tradition in the family, that the new boyfriend pays for it every single time.

Speaker 4 And he gets hit for 400 quid.

Speaker 4 But you know, it's really interesting because like my family's fun and that, but we don't really do stuff like that where you go, right, how can we make this fun for the new person?

Speaker 4 It's not, it's very much you like, you just got to watch and see if you can feel your way in. Yeah, yeah.
So it's kind of like weirdly intimidating, but you're so right.

Speaker 4 That would have been the best thing. But he was very much kind of a bit like my wife, just clearly watching it all.
But he just seems very calm and very lovely. So yeah.

Speaker 4 Is it a sprint to the train now? Have you left enough time? Yes, it's very much. So I have to run to the hotel to get the bag that's got all our stuff in as my wife pushes my son down to the station.

Speaker 4 And then we kind of meet up perfectly just by the Marks and Spencer's, in fact. Then we kind of hot-footed down to the station.
We make it with two minutes to spare. Wow, that's so exciting.
Okay.

Speaker 4 Are you in a fora? You got a table and a four-seater? We got a fora. We're in first class.
There's a family in front of us. And my son is very much kind of wanting to play.

Speaker 4 So he's kind of screaming and playing and looking out the window. He loves trains.

Speaker 4 So for that family in front of us, it was probably a tough hour and 25 because he was and he just kept crawling across the seat back to my wife or back to me. So it was pretty stressful.

Speaker 4 I had three coffees on that train. Three? Yeah.
Holy shit. So tired.
I'm just like off the scale of exhausted.

Speaker 4 Earlier on when you were in the steam room, you said you had steamed, including all your orifices. And now I'm just imagining you holding your arse open as just

Speaker 4 gassy water shoots up. Just out the window.
Yeah, yeah, just whistling in the wind. No, it was just kind of just anything to keep the battery, you know, like you feel.
This is madness, Russell.

Speaker 4 This is total madness. I know you're tired.
Like, I'm tired, but you've had too many coffees today. Of course I know.
That's what's happened.

Speaker 4 But I know because my wife is working tomorrow, so I'm on overnights.

Speaker 4 I know he's not going to sleep. So somehow I'm trying to prepare myself for it.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 we get home. We then get to Marlarbone to get get up to the train to go to where we live.
I'm ordering a waitrose deliveroo so we can get some milk for him for his like his milk.

Speaker 4 I'm thinking, what are we going to cook him? We've got some spaghetti bolognese in the fridge, so I'm kind of like sandwiches. Have we done the sandwiches? Sandwiches have gone.
Yeah, okay.

Speaker 4 God, this guy eats so well. This guy eats, I've got three,

Speaker 4 only eats plain rice. I'm like, this guy's eating Hake Phillip.
It's wild. And I should say, he's slept.
See, the weird thing about it, he's slept amazingly for like the last four months.

Speaker 4 And he's just in this kind of weird thing for the past three weeks. So it's kind of, it's that weird thing.
If I hadn't seen such riches, I could live with being poor. It's kind of.

Speaker 4 Russell, as we speak, I have got, I need help. It's a nightmare.
Could I do some help? Because it's obviously, it's late. Of course.

Speaker 4 So this is what my WhatsApp is looking like. We've got 15 minutes left for the tape as well, haven't we? So

Speaker 4 in 15 minutes, I'll be 15. 15 exclamation mark.
Sorry. Kiss.

Speaker 4 It's also that thing of like, because this is our job. See, this is the problem.

Speaker 4 What does your partner do? Primary school teacher. So there you go.
Proper fucking job. My wife's a doctor.

Speaker 4 So it's just like, there's no realm in which when she's going to hospital, go, can you do the overnights when you work? Yeah. But this is work.
But it's not. I'm in the shed.
I'm in the shed. I'm just

Speaker 4 away from it. Can you come and help me? That's really important.
I've listened to Russell Howard talk about his dad's garden.

Speaker 4 That's no excuse. But then you have to go, well, you know, this is how I pay my section of the mortgage.
So I have to do,

Speaker 4 please. It's going to be fine.
We've got 15 more minutes to go.

Speaker 4 Okay. You aim to get back for 6.30.
I'm sensing we didn't make that. We did.
We got back. We got back at 18.08, but we then have to walk back to our house.
Fred, our dog, has been with the dog walker.

Speaker 4 My son loves the dog. They have a bit of a play.
The dog's really like trying to lick his ears and sniff him. You have to kind of keep that to one side.

Speaker 4 We're making mashed potato and spaghetti bolognese, frozen, put him in his seat for his one last snack he's not really into it kelseprise because he's eaten all the food at this point yeah so it's kind of you know you know one wafer thin mint he's like no i don't want to fucking feed it

Speaker 4 and then i put him to bed so you're able to do that i just from my colleague sometimes ian rushton will be like okay you can put me to bed and then there was a good 18 months where ian was like i'm not interested in you it's just really yeah that's right The other one in here.

Speaker 4 We're back on safe ground now. Yeah, exactly.
Sometimes it's trickier than others, but he's kind of the going to sleep part is an at the minute is all right. So we put on the brown noise on the iPad.

Speaker 4 Brown noise. Set of farts, just really long farts.
Yeah, it's brilliant, honestly. But there's all sorts of noise.

Speaker 4 This app is great. So you can have like country rain, rain, urban rain.
You can have purple rain. Purple rain, of course.
Rain on a tin roof. It's It's kind of incredible, this thing.

Speaker 4 So put him on brown noise because apparently that's the best one. What's brown noise sound like? I'll play it for you.

Speaker 4 Sounds like white noise to me. That's quite a lot.
Do you want to hear white noise so you can have a difference?

Speaker 4 We can compare the two. Right, this is brown noise.
And this is what

Speaker 4 it's thinner.

Speaker 4 I see it's thinner. Yeah.
No. They sound like different aeroplanes taking up.
But if that's what your son needs, I respect it. You want tidewriter?

Speaker 4 How's that going to help? I mean,

Speaker 4 that is not helping anyone.

Speaker 4 It's wild, man, innit? It's just like, this is pink noise.

Speaker 4 Different dishes. Anyways, so you put that on.
He goes to bed. Meanwhile, my wife is getting everything ready because she has to leave.
to go to a hospital at 6.30 to work the next morning.

Speaker 4 So she's doing all that, getting herself ready. I'm putting her son to sleep.
I get him to sleep. I walk downstairs and I have a bowl of musali.
Alpen. Full sugar alpen or no sugar? No, no sugar.

Speaker 4 Okay. But it's still good.
It's still good, but it's not as good. It's not as good, of course.
I haven't had alpen for so long. It's tremendous.

Speaker 4 The sugary stuff is, honestly, it's like a bag of sugar. It's so good.
It's phenomenal.

Speaker 4 And it's also, if you're in a really indulgent mood, if you have the full fat alpen with crunched nut cornflakes,

Speaker 4 Jesus. Oh, what a dream.
And I watch

Speaker 4 about 10 minutes of Land Man, which I've very nearly finished the end of. I see how the foot is gone.

Speaker 4 So, and we're not at match of the day time. This is about eight o'clock now.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
But it's that thing of, I'll be going to bed at nine because I know I'll be up.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, watch a bit of Land Man, have a shower. And then I get into bed.
And I've got a Kindle.

Speaker 4 I used to watch TV as I fell asleep for years, which is another reason why I get the, that my son needs company. I've never been under, I'm not a great sleeper.
So I always needed kind of

Speaker 4 some sort of stimuli to go to sleep. But we had to stop that because we had our son in the bedroom with us in his little cot on the side.
So I got a Kindle.

Speaker 4 Finally, having like just hated the concept of them, I'm very much kind of like, you know, I like the physical book in my hand. It's incredible.
So I've kind of, I've read so much.

Speaker 4 I'm reading really interesting books, but also I've developed a real weird, guilty pleasure. And honestly, I must have read 15 of these.
Chilly Cooper. Andrew Tate.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 They're just so light and breezy. You fly through them, really.
They do do that. They do.
I do need to dominate them. I do need.
But no, it's not a million miles away, bizarrely.

Speaker 4 The Bond novels, not written by Ian Fleming. So William Boyd wrote a James Bond novel because clearly he was a fan of them.
And I read it, and it's just it's a dark place.

Speaker 4 Are you familiar with Garf Marengi? Yeah, one of my favorite old-time TV shows. Well, this is it.

Speaker 4 So, it's that thing of like to go to bed, just this absurd kind of figure, and he's kind of aging slightly in these books as well.

Speaker 4 So, he's not as kind of as far away from that sort of Daniel Craig slick Bond. Do you know what I mean? He's sort of looking at a whiskey and going,

Speaker 4 Oh, God, fuck.

Speaker 4 But still, somehow managing to beat the shit out of everybody and defeat the Russians and have sex with these kind of women with ridiculous names. And it's kind of like this.

Speaker 4 I have 15 minutes of that like absurdity of it. Just kind of.
I was talking to Ross Noble about this the other day, but one of the books, and you can imagine Ross really went for this.

Speaker 4 One of the villains that he is fighting, for some reason, has one large monkey hand.

Speaker 4 Ross Noble wrote this one, did he? Yeah, well, this is it. That's a 15-hour conversation with Ross Noble.
Totally. Well, that was it.

Speaker 4 So I brought it up as kind of like, oh, yeah, and I was really one of them. Yeah, you're right.

Speaker 4 It was 20 minutes later where Ross was, you know, he's exhausted every angle of like, so like, was it like a proper simian hand or like, so I don't know, Ross is just, but yeah, so I read that and I fall asleep and I have the brown noise from my son's monitor kind of in the uh in the atmosphere i gently drift off to sleep little do i know at this point that at 11 30 i will be up again and i will be in my son's room on the mattress

Speaker 4 holding on to my little boy trying to make him go to sleep and he does like i say i sleep on the kind of floor next to him and after three weeks I'm going to need something, I think. I think I need...

Speaker 4 Maybe have another 10 coffees. I need a sleeping bag because the main thing is I'm getting real cold now.

Speaker 4 Actually, it's interesting.

Speaker 4 Last night I brought in, I didn't bring in the day bed, but I did bring in the duvet because my son's got tonsillitis and he's got like a swollen neck, so he can't actually, he's now moving.

Speaker 4 It's so sweet. Max usually just sleeps on Lego.
I'll be doing this podcast. I'll be like, Max, can you reach over and bring the mic closer to your face?

Speaker 4 Unfortunately, I can't move because I slept on four Hot Wheels last night. Yeah, exactly, man.
It's all part of the journey. That's a day.
That is a nice day. Yeah, it's a day.

Speaker 4 It's one of our first Sundays. And what I like about it is it had a Sunday vibe to it.
You know? Do you think? Do you know what? It's the most family episode we've had. Yeah.
I like the Howards.

Speaker 4 The Howards sound fun. I love them.
And it was great. And it was nice to see.
Oh, shit. It's nice to see everybody.
That's your dad, Ron Howard, getting off his motorbike. Well, do you know?

Speaker 4 So, my dad's dad is called Ron, bizarrely. And he's 96 and he was currently living with my dad.
He's doing motocross, isn't it? He's doing motocross. That's what he's doing.
This is it, yeah.

Speaker 4 But so it's this weird thing. So, mum can't walk, dad can't walk, and then they have a 96-year-old that can't walk because he's 96.
So, yeah, I think my mum just needed the rest, to be honest.

Speaker 4 Ron Howard lives in a sort of Thursday murder club type old folks home with a guy who, coincidentally, is called Henry Winkler as well.

Speaker 4 The entire cast of happy days there. Yes, yes, it was a fun day, and it was nice to regurgitate it.

Speaker 4 It's a lovely podcast, this, eh? Because it is that thing of you just have to tell the truth. Yeah.
Do you think anyone's ever lied? We think there's one. Ah, yeah.
The timeline doesn't work.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the timeline just does not quite match up. We had Spencer Matthews on my podcast.
And it's a similar thing, really, where Dave's done it. And Max, I would love you to come on.

Speaker 4 Beautiful podcast, dude. But the concept of it is you just talk about things you like.
So it's called Five Brilliant Things.

Speaker 4 You just end up picking things that you like and then waxing lyrical and getting giddy about it. And it's just quite a nice little format.
So spend some months rocked up.

Speaker 4 And I said, Okay, so what's your first brilliant thing? And he went, Oh, my wife picked them for me. I said, What do you mean? Like that.

Speaker 4 And he was just like, I just asked her because I just, you know, you know, when you're like, fuck me.

Speaker 4 So basically, he spent like the whole time moaning about his wife's selection. She's like, well, I don't even like the works of Jeffrey Chaucer.

Speaker 4 You know, you're like, it's so easy. Just pick things you like.
But evidently.

Speaker 4 Well, Russell Howard, thanks for telling us what you did yesterday. Pleasure.

Speaker 4 So there was Russell Howard. I enjoyed, I mean, my first thought is we should get Russell Howard's dad,

Speaker 4 perhaps mum on the podcast. I mean, Russell was great.
I really enjoyed it, but I'm quite interested to get more members of the Howard family on. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Even just going off on a motorbike to tend to your garden is a very cool.

Speaker 4 It's Jack Reacher meets horticulture is effectively how I see Russell's dad.

Speaker 4 While we've been doing this podcast, have you ever, you know, because at no point do I think people won't be interested in this?

Speaker 4 You know, when we were measuring the distance between the bin and the radiator in Ian Smith's kitchen, I'm thinking this is why people come here.

Speaker 4 But do you reckon anyone was thinking, I have all the podcasts at my fingertips and I'm I'm learning about Russell Howard's dad's garden. Like, is that the moment where someone goes, what?

Speaker 4 Like, that feels important to me.

Speaker 4 I like how we, from our personalities, offer a sort of a spectrum, you know, of questioning.

Speaker 4 And I feel that episode, it really shows it where Russell sits down to write a book. And my suggestion is Jilly Cooper, and yours is Andrew Tate.

Speaker 4 That's the full spectrum of literature there. And it's represented by us, Max.
I'm proud of that moment. It was interestingly, those two have got a podcast together now.

Speaker 4 Oh, my God.

Speaker 4 Rest in peace, Jilly Cooper. It's alt-right horses.
It's alt-right shagging horses. And I think

Speaker 4 it's going to fly. It's going to fly.

Speaker 4 Anyway, thank you, Russell. And go to his show and listen to his podcast.
Then accuse him of stealing that idea from us, even though he started it many years before.

Speaker 4 Our very short-lived A to Z of things we like, apples. I do like apples.

Speaker 4 Here's how to get in touch.

Speaker 4 To get in touch with the show, you can email us at whatdidyoudo yesterdaypod at gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram at yesterdaypod.

Speaker 4 And please subscribe and leave a review if you liked it on your preferred podcast platform. And if you didn't, please don't.

Speaker 4 Thank you, David. Everything is showbiz.
That's something that I think we haven't been saying enough recently. In it for life.
Let's do it again very soon. I hope so.

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