Colin Lane and Frank Woodley – who you probably know as comedy duo Lano & Woodley – returned to the stage in 2018 after a 12-year hiatus. The pair came back to deliver a show about Orville and Wilbur Wright, the brothers who invented powered flight, and it was such a hit they quickly went to work reimagining another epic story. “Because I was in Melbourne during lockdown, I had a lot of time,” Lane says. “So I decided to read Moby-Dick, which is 700 pages. And I said, ‘Why don’t we do a story about Moby-Dick?’ And Frank just went, ‘Oh, yeah.’ So that was the entire creative discussion.” “Frank was just happy I didn’t read Fifty Shades of Grey during lockdown. Otherwise it would have been a very different show.” The pair launched their take on Ahab and his white whale last year and are taking it around the country once more from April. As Lane tells it: “we’ve been doing it for about a year so we can absolutely guarantee … we’ve cut out all the shit bits.” Whether he’s on or off tour, Lane starts his mornings with a cup of tea brewed in a special teapot. Here, he tells us why he’s so passionate about that particular vessel and shares the stories behind two other important personal belongings. What I’d save from my house in a fire I’d take my Robur teapot, which must be 100 years old. I turned 50 a few years ago and a very old friend of mine bought it for me as a birthday gift. If we’re going on a trip for two or three weeks, I’ll take the teapot because it means that much to me. I love it so much that I’ve bought similar models for other people. There’s a guy in Melbourne who renovates them – and, look, they’re not cheap, but I can highly recommend the investment. Something I’m trying to live by lately is “buy once, buy well”. You don’t want to get into bed every night going “I hate this mattress” because you’ve got a shit mattress, just like you don’t want to go into the kitchen every morning thinking “I want a cup of tea but I hate this teapot”. I think that daily ritual of brewing your morning tea is all the better when you know it is going to be made in a beautiful vessel that has withstood decades of existence. My most useful object I’ve discovered there’s this thing called a Bug-A-Salt gun. It’s about a foot long and plastic. And it’s called a Bug-A-Salt gun because you put table salt into it and then when you’ve got an annoying fly in your house during summer, you point it in the right direction and it fires just a minuscule amount of salt at the fly, killing it. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning I don’t want to condone the use of guns but, when it comes to flies, it does mean you’ve got something much better than a fly swat or rolled-up newspaper. Nine times out of 10, you’ll have success. And it’s more environmentally friendly than bug spray! But it does mean that there’s always little mountains of salt around the house. The item I most regret losing I grew up in the 60s and 70s with three sisters. I had a little portable record player, and they bought me – I think it was in 1973 – Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. It was the first record I ever got. But I’ve moved in the last two or three years and I’ve lost it. And I’m extremely disappointed because last year for my birthday, I got a turntable and speakers and everything, and that was the first record that I wanted to play. It’s one of those things where you get a little bit despondent and question your methods of moving. How can a person lose just one record? So the irony is that I’ve had to say goodbye to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.