Last week a friend of mine told me about a thought exercise she’d been doing with her partner where they both had to go backwards through their lives and narrate a memory that came to mind for each age, going as far back as possible. I forget what the point of the exercise was, but I seized on it immediately because, as I’ve written about frequently here before, I love absolutely anything that gamifies the human experience. So we took turns doing it between ourselves, and for quite a while I found that I was able to consider multiple different options for each year, and choose my favourites. But as I got back towards my early 20s it became more a question of just choosing the first thing that surfaced – the years became less neatly organised the further back I went, so I simply had to submerge my hand into the murky waters of, say, 2011, close it around some passing clump of weeds and then pull it out and look at it. More times than not, this involved thinking “Oh my God, I’d forgotten about that.”

One of these unbidden and rarely-thought-about memories ended up being the story of my first ever relationship, which I’ve not really thought about in many years because it didn’t end very well. My friend told me that she was amazed she’d never heard it despite knowing me for twenty years, and said that it was very funny. So here it is. If nothing else, my director Jon Brittain keeps telling me that one day I should try making an autobiographical stand-up show, something that every fibre of my being feels resistant to – I have an uneasy relationship with talking about things that actually happened exactly as they happened. So perhaps trying to wrap my head around some funny true stories here might be a good starting point towards helping me to work out how I might approach that one day. Obviously, I will either be changing names or avoiding using them entirely.

I met my first girlfriend when I was about 17. She was in the year below me at school and also went to the same youth theatre group, and although I knew her vaguely well enough to smile at and say hello to in passing, the main reason I was aware of her was because her friend kept telling me she liked me. She presumably did this in the hope that I would act on the information and perhaps ask her friend out, but being of a nervous disposition, it had the opposite effect and made me absolutely terrified of her. To my knowledge, nobody had ever been romantically interested in me before and I had no idea what to do with the information. I had attempted to ask out girls I was infatuated with before, always with humiliating results, and usually via baffling methods. The year before, I had given a girl a glass teardrop-style earring I had found on the pavement as a gift, hoping this would communicate my undying love to her. She had said “Oh cool, thanks” and that had been the end of the matter, until I later found the same earring in my own coat pocket while walking home.

These previous efforts had left me terrified of approaching any girls with any sort of romantic intention, even when I had been tipped off to the fact that such an approach would be welcomed. If anything, that made the prospect even more frightening as I was now firmly in unknown territory. However, rumours began to spread and soon many of my classmates were making fun of me for having a stalker in the year below. On one occasion she happened to sit on a bench outside the classroom where we were having a lesson and ate a banana. I didn’t see this because my desk faced away from the window, but others in my class claimed that she ate the banana “suggestively” in order to get my attention, and started calling her “Banana Girl” thereafter. For the record, although I didn’t see this incident, I am 99% certain that she ate the banana in a completely normal way, though of course I can never really know this for sure. Maybe she really was as targeted and strategic in her attempts to get my attention as my classmates mockingly suggested, but it really is long past the time when I might have been able to text her and say “Did you deep throat a banana while sitting outside my classroom window one time?” Some things we must simply resign ourselves to not knowing.

Before long, their mockery of her attempts to get my attention steeled me to do what her friend had initially hoped I might – I was going to talk to her. I didn’t like the idea of her getting a cruel nickname like “Banana Girl” merely for the crime of liking me, and I decided that the least I could do was actually have a conversation with her. It turned out she was really nice and we really got on, but I was still paralysed with terror about how to advance things beyond a pleasant enough conversation – I hadn’t found any earrings discarded in the gutter in months, so had no idea how to move things onto the question of romantic attraction.

I decided to finally ask her out the day before my class was due to go on a school trip to Greece to look at old temples. That way, if she said no, I could forget my troubles in a far away country, comforted by the epic and relentless march of time and the knowledge that my deep shame at her rejection was but a speck in comparison to the vast sweep of history.

So I gathered my courage and sent her a text that read:

“No worries at all if not, but I wondered if you’d like to be my girlfriend?”

Bear in mind, we had not been on any dates at this point, we had just been sort of hanging out while rehearsing a play together, but I decided to go straight to “Will you be my girlfriend?” and I decided to do it via the medium of text. She replied more or less immediately with:

“YES! x”

Shortly after, I got a text from that friend of hers that had first told me she liked me which read simply “About time.”

I then explained to my new girlfriend that I was going to Greece very early the next morning and would be back in a week and maybe we could go on our first date then. In hindsight, this was probably quite confusing for her, but I had made that plan in order to protect myself against the eventuality of her saying no. I hadn’t really considered how it might play out if she’d said yes, but I’d made my choices by now and had to make peace with the situation I’d created.

After rehearsals that night she gave me a Lindor chocolate rabbit and a kiss – I wish this had been my first kiss, as it’s quite a sweet story, but sadly my first kiss was a boy in my class when I was nine who, in the middle of a game of Scrabble at his grandma’s house, suggested that we should kiss one another to practice for our future girlfriends. I wasn’t sure if that was a normal thing for two friends to do, but he asserted that as long as we were definitely practicing for future girlfriends then it was fine. He then led me to a spare bedroom where we lay on the bed and made out, with tongues, for about five minutes before I eventually pulled away and said “Can’t you just practice on a cushion?” He replied by reasonably pointing out that a cushion isn’t an accurate enough simulation (I’m not 100% sure if he actually said “simulation,” but that’s how I remember it now), but it was too late, I had killed the vibe. This story is slightly less sweet, and much more confusing in my memory, but thank goodness it happened or my first kiss with my first girlfriend all those years later would’ve been rubbish due to lack of practice.

Then I went to Greece and had the time of my life. Without wanting to make this into too much of a “woe is me” story, before that Greece trip I had been quite a lonely, isolated kid, without many friends. While I was there I really felt like I came out of my shell a bit, and started making friends with the others on the trip. Unbeknownst to me, somebody on the trip started a Facebook group called “The Josiah Norris Appreciation Society” which treated me like some sort of rare and fascinating butterfly that needed to be studied and made sense of. The group’s description read:

This is a place to celebrate the strange and unique Josiah Norris. Reasons we love him include:

1. He unironically wears a hat with the branding of the children’s TV show Balamory on it
2. Those weird John Lennon sunglasses he wears
3. He thinks that spraying the previous day’s clothes with deodorant means they are clean and ready to be worn again
4. He’s trying to start a small business selling protein shakes in bulk in the sixth form common room
5. You just want to put him in your pocket

And so on. I didn’t know about this group because I didn’t have Facebook at the time. I was informed of it later, so initially it was just a place for people to enjoy the idea of me. So I traipsed around Olympia and Athens and Epidaurus and Mycenae and enjoyed the feeling of being enjoyed by my peers for maybe the first time in my life. But at the same time I was moping about my girlfriend back home like a war poet pining for his sweetheart and trying to hear the music of her voice in the pounding of shells and rifle fire.

“This place is amazing,” I would sigh as we trudged around the ruins of the Oracle at Delphi, “but I sure wish my girlfriend was here to see it.” These new friends of mine who were taking such an interest in me all of a sudden asked to know more about her, like how long we’d been going out. “One day,” I replied, my heart aching. “I just wish I could share all this with her.” I tried taking some photos of the ruins to send to her, but these were the early days of camera phones and picture messages so all my photos just resembled differently hued blurs and it probably cost me something like £5 to send each one. Nonetheless, every grey blur I sent her invariably got a reply saying “Wow, it looks amazing! I wish I was there. Miss you.”

I must extend a particular apology to a girl on that trip who for the purposes of this retelling I’ll call Hannah, who I ended up sharing the lion’s share of this heartache with. One night we all went out to a bar in Tolon and I found myself unable to relax and have fun like the others because I was too busy staring out over the wine-dark sea and thinking about my girlfriend back home. I eventually told the others that I was going back to the hotel because I was “too sad to have fun,” and Hannah came with me, saying she wasn’t up for a night out either. I recognised in her a sort of kindred sadness that made me feel emboldened to spend the rest of that night telling her more about how hard it was to be separated from the person you love, and asking her if she knew how that felt too. “Yeah, I think I know how that feels,” she had replied. It wasn’t until later in the trip that I was informed by her friends why she had been sad and was told that she would really appreciate it if I stopped telling her about my girlfriend. I still feel really, really bad about this.

When I got back from Greece, my girlfriend and I ended up going out for about three months (this does mean that I spent roughly 8.33% of our entire relationship in Greece without her). For pretty much that whole time, it was really nice. She introduced me to the Gerard Butler movie of The Phantom Of The Opera (I’ve actually only just realised this is how I got into the musical, wow that’s funny). We watched Doctor Who together every Saturday. I would turn up at her class’s form room at lunchtimes to give her an apple. That kind of thing. We made a point of celebrating our one and two-month anniversaries by doing something special like going to get a Subway together or something. Then on our three month anniversary, I messed up.

Some context here – my driving instructor had made me stop the car in the middle of an industrial estate halfway through a recent driving lesson because we had driven past a huge stack of crates of protein shakes with a hand-written sign saying “HELP YOURSELF!”

“This is a great deal,” he’d said as he started loading them into the back of his car. “You don’t see this every day.” It took him about ten minutes to load roughly twenty crates of the stuff into the boot and the back seat before he eventually restarted the lesson. At the end of the lesson (which he did not extend by ten minutes to account for the time he spent filling the car with protein shakes, he just ended it at the originally agreed time), when dropping me off back at my house, he had said “Actually this is too much for me. Do you mind taking half?” and I had spent a further ten minutes walking crates of protein shakes down into the kitchen from the drive, much to my mum and stepdad’s bemusement.

I had initially been excited about this – what teenage boy doesn’t love free soft drinks? I tried drinking one of the protein shakes myself, hoping it would be a bit like Nesquik or Yazoo, thought it was absolutely foul and poured it down the sink, then tried to work out what I was going to do with the other one hundred and ninety-nine bottles of the stuff. For a while I had entertained the idea of starting a small business where I sold them in bulk to people in school, so had started bringing a crate into the sixth form common room and just going up to people with it asking if they wanted to buy it from me. One girl took a box off my hands for £5 because she was “trying to get big,” but I still had nine more crates to offload and literally nobody else wanted any.

On the day of our three-month anniversary, I had been given a clear ultimatum from my mum and stepdad that the shakes had to be gone by the end of the day, and that it was my responsibility as I had brought them into the house in the first place. I spent the day transporting them to the tip in a wheelbarrow and by the end of the day, came home to a text saying “I was hoping to see you for our three-month anniversary.” I couldn’t believe it – how had I forgotten?

I resolved to make it up to her. The next week she was playing the lead role in the school’s production of the musical The Boyfriend. I had been invited to the cast party afterwards and resolved to spend the night not only celebrating her brilliance, but also by being the life and soul of the party so that all her cast-mates would be struck by how wonderful our relationship was. “Never mind The Boyfriend,” they might say, “it’s your boyfriend that we think is great!”

Before this point I had only been to one party before in my life. It had ended with me throwing my gloves onto the floor and screaming “WHEN ARE WE GOING HOME?” at my brother in the middle of the front hall in a way that made everybody else stop talking and stare at me (in my memory, the music even stopped, like I was a stranger in town walking into a seedy saloon). I was determined to be more charismatic this time. I had an idea of what being the life and soul of the party involved from films and TV, and knew that getting drunk and behaving in an eccentric manner were key components. I had never drunk before and had no intention of starting that night, but I decided I would probably come across as more charming and impressive if I seemed to be very, very drunk.

I therefore spent the entire night acting like I was Oliver Reed – stumbling around, pretending to fall over, singing loudly, shouting things like “Wasn’t she brilliant?!” and “Let’s have three cheers for my amazing girlfriend, the star of the show!” After about fifteen minutes of this I noticed that she was looking completely mortified, which rather threw a spanner in the works. I couldn’t very well suddenly start acting less drunk or people might twig that I was faking, so I decided to up the ante and do something completely crazy and hilarious – something that would make it clear that what I was doing was actually brilliant and not embarrassing for her. I went to the snacks table, took an onion ring out of a bowl, and put it on her finger. “Will you marry me, darling?” I crowed. Somebody else then said that maybe I should have a lie down and I spent most of the rest of the party pretending to be asleep on a sofa, one eye slightly open as I watched everyone else having a good time, and nursing a nagging worry in my heart that I might have slightly messed up here.

The next day I tried to smooth things over by talking about how fun the party had been, and reiterating how brilliant she was in the play. She was pissed off.

“I wish you hadn’t got drunk,” she said. “And I wish you hadn’t done that stupid thing with the onion ring. It just made me feel like you thought the idea of marrying me was just a joke, which makes it pretty clear you don’t think this is serious.” I remember feeling really stuck in this situation. I had an excuse ready to go which would fully exonerate me from the charges of getting drunk and acting up at her cast party. But pulling that lever and clearing myself of that accusation would require me to explain that in actual fact I had been pretending to be drunk and had done all those things while completely lucid because I thought they would make me seem funny and charming. Somehow, despite my clear lack of emotional intelligence at the time, I knew that admitting this would not improve the situation. I just sighed. “I just drank too much of that damn Hooch,” I said, shaking my head. I was pretty certain Hooch was a drink.

She broke up with me a week later, after I made a few further feeble attempts to turn up at her form room with two apples. She did it via text in the end, and I pretty much never saw her again – whenever I did see her, she was usually with that friend of hers who had first told me she liked me, who would invariably come up to me and go “She doesn’t want to see you.”

Everybody should have a friend like that. I’m glad I found mine in the end, and I’m glad that twenty years later she’s still giving me thought exercises to play that gamify the human experience and help me to stumble across bits of my life that I haven’t thought about in years.

A Quick Plug – The You Wait. Time Passes. tour has its FINAL DATE next week, at the beautiful Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury on Saturday the 20th! I booked and have been managing this entire tour all by myself, which has been stressful but really rewarding, and because it’s just been me it’s meant that it’s a slightly oddly-shaped tour, meaning this final date is a bit of a weird one-off a couple of months after all the other dates finished. It’s odd knowing that there’s this one final show to go before I can really feel like it’s “done,” but the Marlowe is a really beautiful theatre and I’m very happy I get to finish it there. I’d obviously love it to be a really nice, buzzy, friendly show to send it off with a bang, so if you live nearby or know people who do, I’d love to see you there or if you could help spread the word! Presales are decent and broadly in line with most of the other tour dates, but there’s plenty of tickets left to sell and I’d love to get the last one as busy as I can – maybe see you there!

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – Sam Campbell’s Make That Movie has finally come out on Channel 4, and it’s packed full of so much amazing comedy talent. I’m only a couple of episodes in so far but it’s already so dumb and silly, and I must say it’s a real breath of fresh air to see a TV comedy whose only intention is to be stupid and make us laugh. The more comedy-drama-leaning output of the last few years has included some amazing shows, but I have been hankering after more purely silly stuff, and this feels like an exciting new standard-bearer for that.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – I watched Ben Alborough’s Channel 5 interview with Dan Walker about being owed money by Leicester Comedy Festival and noticed that the only comment was from someone saying “What a nice desk,” and it really made me laugh. A great reminder of just how engaged with the plight of the self-employed comedian the general public is.

Book Of The Week – I’m reading The Labours Of Hercules by Agatha Christie, a short story collection in which Hercule Poirot decides to take on twelve cases that each correspond to one of the twelve Labours of Hercules. What I love about it is that he decides to do this before knowing what the twelve cases will be, and keeps really straining to make them fit. Highlights so far include “Your missing Pekingese dog, he is like the Nemean lion, non?” and “Ah yes, rumour. Rumour is like the Lernean Hydra – chop off one head and two grow back.” My absolute favourite, though, involves a handsome young man who visits Poirot and asks for help, but Poirot isn’t listening because he’s too busy thinking about how fit the guy is, and saying to himself “This man is like a Greek god, much like an Arcadian shepherd.” Then when the guy asks for some help tracking down a blonde woman, he says “Her blonde hair sounds not unlike the golden horns of the Arcadian deer. The Arcadian shepherd and his golden hind. Yes, I shall take this case.” It feels like Poirot is having a full-on breakdown and I love it.

Album Of The Week – Broadcasting From Home by Penguin Cafe Orchestra. I had the pleasure of opening for the amazing John Kearns on tour in Leicester last week, and was delighted to find that two moments in his wonderful new show are soundtracked to songs by Penguin Cafe Orchestra, one of them being the beautiful “Music For A Found Harmonium” from this album. I’ve been getting into PCO’s discography recently and had considered skipping over this one as I wasn’t sure if it was essential, but that bit of synchronicity convinced me to give it a try and whaddya know, it might be my favourite of theirs. It’s such lovely music.

Film Of The Week – Savage House. This is so horrible, but so brilliant. Richard E. Grant and Claire Foy play two disgraced Georgian aristocrats who have one last chance to restore honour to their family name, and chaos ensues. It’s a really interesting insight into how miserable that period of history almost certainly was, and a really interesting study of things like FOMO and imposter syndrome that feel quite modern but work really well being transplanted into a period piece like this. I loved it, and Grant and Foy are both extraordinary in it.

That’s all for this week! Let me know what you thought and, as ever, if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d hugely appreciate it! Take care of yourselves until next time,

Joz xx

PS Feel free to send me a tip on Ko-Fi if you enjoy my work and would like to support me to keep making it!

PPS I don’t think I’ve written a newsletter since the Jackman/Phantom show played the Brighton Fringe and got nominated for another award! (The Komedia Alternative Comedy Award this time). I had such a great time, and am very grateful to Brighton Fringe and Liebenspeil for having me. Here’s a great photo by Rob Trendy of the Phantom hosting the Stepdads Les Mis show in Brighton as part of that same weekend:

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