Six flyers in Stretford

Tom Hardman. Two inches taller, or maybe I shrunk. Manchester Uni halls — so he did the version of life I was supposed to do, the one where you go and you pass and you come out the other side as someone with a job title and a flat that isn't a flatshare. He had six flyers in his pocket. Six. My mum has been handing these out at some luncheon club in Stretford like she's running a campaign office nobody hired her for. She wasn't asked. She just decided. That's the bit I can't put in a set because it's not funny, it's just a woman who believes in her son so hard she becomes embarrassing, and I am the worst person alive for finding it embarrassing because I am the reason she's doing it.

He hadn't seen the clip. He didn't know about the Bethnal Green bomb. He didn't know about the panic attack, about the bathroom, about any of it. He knew me as the lad from the kitchen in halls whose mum once brought round a Tupperware of cottage pie when I was skint. That's the whole of me he had. And he was happy with it. He was happy with the flyer version.

I wanted to be furious. Furious is easy. Furious is the bit I'd write — mate, you've come to the wrong show, the real show is on TikTok and it's worse, I cried in a bathroom and forty thousand people watched me do it. Furious I could have done on the walk home and it would have felt clean.