Sunday with Tim Key: ‘Those comforting evenings in the pub will be back’

  • 2/28/2021
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How do your Sundays start? They start with a run. It’s vital to get something useful under your belt early doors. I love reading Irvine Welsh at any time, but Sunday mornings are best. Coffee, Radox, Francis Begbie. Very relaxing. Sunday afternoons? Before ‘the problems’, I’d watch the football at mine with some local men: big pots of coffee; circular, pointless conversation; low-grade gambling. I have a screen and a projector so I might pull that down. It’s at a weird angle so the ball comes off the edge. The ‘new’ Sunday afternoons… You adapt. These days I bang a chicken in the oven and boot a ball around the park with my friend, Fatberg. The goals are chained up and there’s a sense of loss in the air, but football is still a tonic. We do drills. He wears shin pads. It’s pathetic, really. How’s lunch? The timings are all wrong, so the chicken’s bone-dry and the potatoes are like rocks when I get back. Do you work? I’ve started doing an online gig on Sunday evenings: I read out poems about lockdown and dart around my flat. The complete obliteration of live comedy has been a kick in the balls. These gigs can’t replace the warmth and fear of being in a room with an actual audience. Still, I can spew gobbledygook, and some people turn up. And Sunday night? There’s lots I miss about ‘before’, and Sunday nights in the pub are right up there. The Colonel and I would wander to my local, find a table by a fire and squeeze the last drips of beer from the weekend. Those comforting evenings will be back, of course. Now the Colonel and I sometimes text each other reassuring one another of it. He Used Thought As a Wife: an Anthology of Poems and Conversations (From Inside), by Tim Key is out now (utterand press.co.uk, £,15). Series three of Pls Like is on BBC iPlayer

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