It started in a snowstorm in Basingstoke and ended on a glacier in Iceland and in between I recited poetry to a quarter of a million people.

Like all years now, as it ends, I wonder if I have gone anywhere or done anything at all. Those of us who know we are very lazy try to disguise the fact by working all the time. I don’t know where my work ethic came from. I dream of days without deadlines and feel ashamed when there are none.

I wrote very little this year, there were books written in 2017 and 2018 and anthologies compiled and contributed to in 2017, but this year there was just an introduction to 10 Voyages Through the Human Mind and a short piece for the 50th Anniversary edition of Slaughterhouse 5 and the usual blogs. Instead, I continued touring my I’m a Joke and So Are You talk, one of the favourite things I have done.

I hated the book when I finished it in July last year. I think that is the natural process. Draft one is a delight. Draft two you feel like you have found the book. It is all downhill from thereon. On the day it came out, I saw a lukewarm Amazon review and resigned myself to my own mediocrity again. Since then, I have grown to like it. I am no Jilly Cooper or Adam Kay, but it has not fallen stillborn from the press. The most gratifying part is to be approached by people who wish to share stories of the activities of their mind, people who tell me, “I thought I was the only one with those thoughts.” We all want to be useful, so I am glad that people have found my book helpful.

The person who approached me in a record shop and unobtrusively told me of what they had taken from the book and the ninety five year old in Totnes stick out among the conversations.

I am not much of a social person when removed from talks and touring. I am gregarious post show, but once they are done (and they are rarely done), I mainly stay in my attic room or play crazy golf with my son.

I also toured Chaos of Delight again. After a fumbling start in Liverpool, it went on to become my favourite show. At the final outing in December, I was still chasing things and tinkering with possibilities. I found a sheet of notes from the early days of it and realised that, bit by bit, pieces has disappeared and single lines had become twenty minutes of ludicrous performance. It was great to be joined by She Makes War (now Laura Kidd having retired that version of herself in the last few weeks).

The big event was the 77 date tour with Brian Cox. It is a very different sense of adrenaline that moves through you when playing the O2 rather than Corsham Art Centre, strangely, I think it may be less. It was a beautiful thing to see 12,000 people gathered to watch a lecture on black holes and time occasionally interrupted by a buffoon talking about the rubber hand illusion or regaling them with tales of past dens. The first enormous gig of that tour was Manchester Arena. Oddly, you just get on with it and then, when we are up at a pub in the moors an hour later, you start to think, “now that really was a lot of people.”

It was a joy to do our first North America tour, from Virginia to California – a month of art galleries, boxing and particle physics. And we also finally got to the South Island of New Zealand.

On top of that was a trip to Florida to make a lunar landing special (Brian still being disappointed that there is not a Moonbase Alpha for us to do an outside broadcast of Infinite Monkey Cage on).

Andy Aldrin told us of how his greatest fear was if his dad tripped over on the Moon while all his friends were watching and Rusty Schweickart talked of how the Apollo missions’ most important achievement may well have been the Earthrise photo taken by Apollo 8. It is a view worth pondering on Christmas Day…on any day.

Anders’ Earthrise photo. Pic by NASA

And of course there was the Compendium of Reason and Nine Lessons and Carols for Curious People to round out the year.

Next year is a quieter year, a year to write two books, though also to fit in a Generator show with Chris Hadfield in Toronto, a talk about the Cottingley Fairies in Todmorden and a trip to the Hebrides for the Dark Skies festival. I’ll also be mustering up a few more outings for my Satanic Rites show on how ghosts and vampires were my saviour when I was young. Thank you to the Abertoir festival for reigniting my passion to create that show.

Some Rough Statistics of 2019:

• 77 Universal shows with Professor Brian Cox

• 13 episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cages

• 31 Chaos of Delight shows

• 45 episodes of Josie and Robin’s Book Shambles

• 19 I’m a Joke and So Are You shows

• 7 Nine Lessons and Carols for Curious People

• 1 Brian and Robin’s Christmas Compendium of Reason

• 4 Summer Festivals

• 1 Philosophy Conference

• 1 Horror Movie Festival

• 41 various other gigs

Tickets for the 2020 edition of Nine Lessons and Compendium are on sale now. I will be doing a double bill at Norwich Playhouse in January. And I’m a Joke is out now in paperback.

Robin Ince is a multi-award winning comedian, writer and broadcaster.  As well as spending decades as one the UK’s most respected stand-ups, Robin is perhaps best known for co-hosting The Infinite Monkey Cage radio show with Brian Cox.  For his work on projects like Cosmic Shambles he was made an Honorary Doctor of Science by Royal Holloway, University of London. His latest book, I’m a Joke and So Are You is out now.

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