‘Journalling’ is now a good thing, which we know because it’s part of Bryan Johnson’s morning routine, sandwiched between eating algae and sauna-ing with a Bryan Johnson-trademarked ice pack on his crotch. It’s nice to check in with Johnson – the tech millionaire who wants to ‘defeat death’ – every few hours. This week I embarked on my biggest ever stand-up tour, a tour whose scale makes it seem like a culmination of everything to this point. Venues you dream of playing, ones which seem so distant in the mud and piss of the UK’s comedy circuit. Twelve hundred people tonight, 1,500 the night before. ‘Only 680 tonight is it?’ I shrug from the back seat of my tour manager’s Skoda, like a man used to four-figure wine rolling his eyes at a mere Château Lafite.

We stop at Greggs. Hot approximations of pork wrapped in pastry for lunch, again. That’s what’s good about stand-up, you never stay in the clouds too long. Service stations are a great leveller. There are no two-tier fuel stops, no standard premium here. No one at these places got the memo that coffee tastes sour now. They’re still serving 1943 stuff, the watery slop Americans fashioned while liberating Italy. That’s why it’s nice to check in with Johnson’s parallel life; him wearing a red-light mask in a hyperbaric chamber in California, me folded into the back of an estate car with a baked bean slice off the M62. Only one of us is living. I know this will end, you see. But Californians have this insufferable sense they are beyond nature’s laws. I admit it was hard not to watch the wildfires without a tinge of satisfaction, retribution from the gods, not that it makes a dent in the conviction of our self-appointed messiahs, the Zuckerbergs and the Altmans, these Stepford industrialists whose tune we all march to now.

Still, we have to take some responsibility for our own doom-scrolling. I’ve taken a novel on the road with me, Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success, which I am enjoying, as I knew I would because he’s Jewish and from New York and apart from Updike the only fiction that gets me going is written by Jews from New York. Other authors don’t care about making the sentences funny, nor do they attempt to pretend anyone reads fiction other than women. As someone who’s professionally funny to a predominantly male audience, these are my criteria. My first book was published this week, you see. A History of Mankind In Its Entirety (Abridged): An Unsupervised PhD.

I have a lot going on. The book tour was last weekend, five shows in four days, one night at home, then back on the road with the book relegated to the merch stand. It’s been one of those weeks. A week that’s ‘loomed’. My wife is the human shield, wrangling the toddlers, two of them. They’re at a ‘fun age’, which is what people say when they’re able to visit then leave. Some days it is hard to imagine our lives would be any different if instead of children we had an infestation of racoons. My tour manager’s been driving me back after shows as much as possible so I can do the school run the following morning. Sleep is in snatches – four hours at home, two hours on green-room sofas – oh, I know Bryan, that’s not good enough. Another reel pops up of Bryan with his perma-face and his girlfriend who is dispiritingly attractive. They sleep in separate beds, apparently. They don’t have children, but it’s all about sleep now. Sleep is the body’s gold reserve, the thing all currency is tied to, so separate beds are a must. After all, they have to get up at 5 a.m. to blast artificial sunlight into their faces and eat powdered collagen. Wouldn’t want to be doing that on a hangover.

Stand-up tours are the opposite of Bryan’s day-to-day, but I’m trying. Reading rather than scrolling (this month’s been tough because of all the 9/11 reels; that’s a very short off-ramp for me, I can be gone for hours rubbernecking my own loss of innocence). Herbal teas rather than beers. Limiting the amount of processed pork, for some reason still inextricably tied to the hotel experience. I like feeling good on stage, I like feeling fully conscious up there. This may be the best it gets. But it’s a means to an end. Johnson’s sober so he can get up and be sober all day. Isn’t the point of feeling rested that you’re able to enjoy things?