I Laughed Myself Out of a Neurological Disorder

An alternative Edinburgh Fringe Festival Review

The author in a post-show selfie with stand-up comedian Ignacio Lopez

As a prizewinning novelist and scholar with poems on the UK exam syllabus, naturally, I am in need of your support because hell, when did intelligence, diligence or artistic skill ever correlate to income? After 27 years teaching creative writing I am deemed ‘redundant’. Why not prove the buggers wrong and show your support by taking out a free or paid subscription?

---

Let’s start with a joke from my childhood.

What goes ha ha ha ha bonk?

A man laughing his head off.

Hey, I thought laughter was the best medicine?

Yes, you should ask the writer Ros Barber about that. I hear she laughed herself out of a neurological disorder.

This is no gag. Everything they say about laughter is true. Disclaimer: this Substack is for entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice.

But if I’ve had a crap day, my prescription to myself is always comedy first. Comedy before alcohol. If I have to actually resort to alcohol before the comedy can land, I’m in a very bad way.

I love stand-up especially. I love it so much I have even tried my hand at it. Here’s a clip from my first attempt.

Yes, I brought my own fan club, but I’m proud of the fact that I was deemed the second funniest of this crop of Jill Edward’s weekend course, and the first funniest was already doing regular open mics. I have enough parallel careers already, so I haven’t taken it further (this was five years ago), but as a punter, I appreciate stand-up above almost any other way of spending an evening.

For this reason, going to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival had long been a dream. Responsibilities (offspring) and lack of funds kept it at arm’s length until August 2022, when, yet again, I was watching friends posting updates about their shows (I pretty much always know someone who is performing at Edinburgh). There I was, boiling in my usual big vat of August envy, when I suddenly remembered I was about to get a chunk of money from Dad’s will, my daughter had pretty much divested me of any obligation to spend time with her and … hey, I could go to Edinburgh now (well, next year). There and then, I booked a week’s accommodation on the Royal Mile for the following August.

But by the time August 2023 came around, I wasn’t in a good way. Stuff had happened. Stuff that I still can’t talk about, but which wrecked me for a while. And not just emotionally. As explored in The Half a Million Pounds Wife, chronic emotions tend to be expressed in physical form. And this form was really not funny. It was vertigo.

My mum had a collection of letters from James Stewart. He even wrote to her from his honeymoon. My idiot grandmother threw out Jimmy’s letters when Mum went to university. Nanna was not forgiven.

Not a fear of heights: that’s acrophobia (thanks, Hitch). But balance issues. Because you’ve guessed it, there was a serious lack of balance in my life (bodies are so goddamn literal). I’ve had vertigo before, of the kind known as BPPV, Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. It runs in the family: father, sister, and daughter have all had bouts. It’s an inner ear problem where the calcium crystals in your semi-circular canals (nudged right up against the malleus, incus and stapes, remember them?) break free and cause havoc, sending your brain confusing signals that make the world seem to spin like a very bad night on rum punch.

It first floored me in mid-June. Or maybe I should say bedded me (sexy as that sounds, it really wasn’t) because bed-bound is what I became. For a week. It snuck up on me via alcohol. I am not a big drinker these days and I never, and I mean never, drink wine of the flat sort. (Bubbles I can do). But I had a deeply shaming experience at a social event that left me lurching for the free Sauvignon. University department Sauvignon, in these times of tightened budgets, is dangerous even for the fierce-livered, but me?  I knew full well what I was doing, and I drank it anyway. It was an act of deliberate self-harm.

Predictably, the planned punishment arrived; a hangover so debilitating that the room was still spinning the next afternoon. This turned into a classic wine-induced two-day migraine. But when the room was still spinning on day three? This wasn’t like being hungover, it was like being drunk. Trying to hold my head still to ward off the waves of nausea, I googled

Can you stay drunk for three days?

And then it dawned on me.

The original hangover had just segued into vertigo, the way old-school DJs, when the night was ending, would segue into Three Times A Lady.

I’d only had vertigo a couple of times before, but from those experiences and my daughter’s two bouts, I knew that it could be fixed with the Epley Manoeuvre. Which isn’t fun; you feel way more sick when you’re doing it. But as soon as you get the angles and timings right, you can kiss your vertigo goodbye.

I couldn’t kiss my vertigo goodbye. My vertigo was clinging onto me like a drunken Greek cousin at a wedding. In fact, the more Epley Maneovres I tried (each at the cost of a wave of nausea that would have me in tears for 15 minutes), the more my vertigo was like one of those face huggers in Alien. Not. Letting. Go. This was no ordinary vertigo. Friend, this was Special Edition Super-Deluxe Vertigo, and it had moved in for the summer.

A metaphor is as close as I’ll ever get to being like Ripley.

Sure, I drugged it (with the help of my GP) and dragged it out to the front porch for a while, where it sat, sullenly smoking. But it never quite left. I got back on my feet after a week, but was consistently dizzy, walking down hallways with my hands out in case I lost my balance.

On a day in July when I had fooled myself that I was better, I demolished my daughter’s bathroom, only to have my unwelcome lodger, Dizzy, move straight back in. Another week flat on my back, taking anti-psychotics for what was proving to be not BPPV, but some kind of neurological disorder.

I was tapping to get to the bottom of it, but where was the bottom? It felt connected to me falling in my own estimation and the eyes of others. A vertiginous fall in my own self-perception that I couldn’t seem to remedy. Thus, dizzy I remained.

Trying to get that bathroom back to a usable form was fun. I’ll admit, a year later, it’s still not complete. But at least I got enough tiles down to plumb in the new loo before my daughter came back from holiday, so she and her wife didn’t have to crap in a bucket. By setting timers, doing an hour, lying down for twenty minutes. No more than three spaced-out hours. And all the time, never very steady on my feet.

And Edinburgh was coming. This thing I’d look forward to for forty-five years, since my Mum went with her friend Mary and I thought to myself, I want to do that some day.

We took the sleeper train. We arrived. We climbed the Hitchcockian stone spiral stairs to our lofty apartment. I kept a grip on the bannister. And through the first day’s shows, I was struggling. I recall, on the second day, tearfully dizzy on the cobbles, thinking is this it? Is it all breaking down? My vestibular system first, and then the rest? Losing my mobility? Is this how my ending begins?

It’s not that I’m prone to catastrophising, but I’ve had friends drop dead much younger than me, and by now, I’d been ill for more than two months.

But we were there to laugh.

We had tickets for five or six comedy shows a day. Solo performers and multi-act tasters. Improv. Sketch shows. Stand-up after stand-up. I laughed, and I laughed, and I don’t remember when I stopped feeling dizzy. But Dizzy got fed up with not being felt and finally – praise the stand-up comedy gods – moved out. By the end of my comedy week, I was thoroughly well. And my vertigo hasn’t come back.

Cliches only stick because they’re true.

Laughter truly is the best medicine ha ha ha ha no really.

+++ Please press the heart to help other people find and enjoy this piece +++

---

Funny things I’ve enjoyed on Substack:

A comedy focus this week. I never thought I’d utter the words ‘Thanks for the dick pics’ but if you want a good laugh you have to read

Shelly Mazzanoble

’s Why So Many Dicks at the Olympics? If you enjoy what people tend to call my self-deprecating humour, you’ll enjoy

Georgina Bruce

; I have only just now stopped guffawing at this week’s piece, which demonstrates the art of the killer subtitle with ‘How to cockblock yourself with just an internet connection and a pair of blunt kitchen scissors’ Are all my recommendations going to be penis themed, you ask? No, they are not.

Chris Stanton

might have one (I haven’t checked), but when you read The Corporate Martyrdom Games, you’ll understand that everyone with a Proper Job (hey! not me!) is just far too busy for that kind of thing. May these three doses of laughter heal what ails you.

Since last week I have:

1. Created my final maps and completed a version of my manuscript I’m truly happy with.

2. Had some very good news on a podcast project.

3. Invented a fictional literary cleansing ritual for my new writing cabin (see Note of the week).

Note of the week

Over to you

1. Have you ever suffered from vertigo?

2. Have you cured anything with laughter, deliberately or otherwise? (Laughing yoga, anyone?)

3. How do you feel about stand-up?

4. Any comedy recommendations?