There were some things Leonard didn’t leave to the universe, though, and he came up with a genius plan for me to get some proper practice in before the Fringe. Not just in front of the mirror or Mum or Jax like usual, but with a real audience at real pubs where they let you get up and have a go onstage. Open mics, they’re called. Leonard did a lot of Googling and found one in all the places where we’re going to stop and maybe meet my dad, and even though it made our trip look a bit wonky on the map so we could end up in the right place on the right night, Leonard said that was okay because the road to success is never straight. Which makes a lot of sense, and I reckon it also proves that Leonard might be the best Googler in the world.

Absolutely anyone’s allowed to get up at an open mic night, so I was thinking that maybe there’d be at least one or two other people that needed the practice as much as me. Although I knew I probably shouldn’t really count on that.

Whenever I thought about the actual standing up there and doing jokes on my own in front of a pub load of strangers I felt pretty scared. But Leonard said that was a good thing, because if I could get as much of the scared feeling out of the way as possible, by the time I got to the Fringe there wouldn’t be so much left inside me. He said that’s what he used to do when he was a soldier and he had to do stuff like sneak through the jungle in the middle of the night with a bunch of enemy soldiers asleep just a few yards away. Which sounds pretty scary. And even though secretly I was thinking that there probably wasn’t going to be enough open mics in the whole of England and Scotland put together to get rid of the amount of scared I had inside of me, I figured if it worked for Leonard it was worth a try.

Before Mum saw the new plan and decided we were going to make it come true I never had to think about how it would really and truly feel to have to get up and try and do comedy without Jax. But then suddenly it was only a week until we left and I had to think about it pretty much all the time. Even though I’ve got the best mum in the world and she sat there and listened to my jokes every single morning and every single afternoon to try and help me, even when she already knew the punch lines, how much I missed Jax got in the way quite a lot.

Sometimes when it got in the way so much that my skin started itching like it was going to turn itself inside out, I’d go down to the beach and sit there and try to guess the distance between the horizon and infinity, like me and Jax used to, which made me feel a bit better. Also, when I was sitting on the beach it felt like there was still the smallest chance that Jax might creep up behind me and hit me in the head with a massive sand ball, like he used to. And then lie there doing sand angels on the beach, cracking up laughing because he got me again. Gotcha again, Normie boy! You’ll never learn! Woo-hoo, I’m the best, sand balls to the rest!