Rebel, rebel.

"...in the summer of 1981. It was lush. There was something in there I'd never come across before, a tangy flavour my taste buds had never previously known the pleasure of."

That's arguably the most sensual passage in Teenage Revolution, Alan Davies' engaging memoir of the 1980s. Alas (for me), the author is not describing a summer romance nor his sexual awakening, but his first bite into a McDonald's hamburger.

And yet I can still relate. In fact, it's remarkable how similar my own teen years were to the ones he describes, despite our being born on separate continents. We're both the same age, both from single-parent homes, and both grew up watching eye-wateringly long hours of television. I never had a CND badge, but just like young Alan I had a series of very carefully-chosen wall posters in my bedroom: No Nukes, Monty Python, Steve Martin, gay rights, John Lennon. We shared ideals and heroes, even if I was a girl who preferred Bob Dylan to Blondie and supported the L.A.Dodgers instead of Arsenal F.C. But where teenage Alan felt himself part of a current and vital lefty revolution in the UK, I always felt that I'd been born too late, that the flower power movement in America had passed me by. I was proud of being a non-conformist but I never quite felt like a rebel. For me, right after university came marriage, a baby, divorce, and a long period of time during which I was mainly concerned with keeping myself and my son safe and provided for. But I still had ideals. And heroes. I still do have heroes. And now I count Alan Davies among them. Because, although my life is a lot nicer now than it was 15 years ago, I still sometimes need to know that at the end of a sucky day, I'll get a chance to just forget all the shit and laugh. TV comedy has provided that for me my whole life, especially Python, Saturday Night Live (not SNL, please) and David Letterman ("Your TV Friend"). And it's still really, really important to me to know that I can switch on the AppleTV, search for a QI or one of Alan's other shows, and get that precious comfort of a laugh whenever I need to.

After reading the wonderfully honest Teenage Revolution and watching the TV series, I really have to marvel at how much you can know about someone you don't actually know. I mean, I realize that most actors are just that -- performers, who present only a portion of their true-life persona to the public. But I can't help feeling there's something special about a stand-up comedian, which is what Alan Davies started out as, and what I particularly treasure him for being. It's difficult to follow a comedian's performances (and tweets!) over time and not come away with at least some impression of him as a person. And my impression is that Alan Davies is a good guy. I can't help hoping he'll write about his post-80s life someday. But for now, he has every reason to be proud of the young man he was, as well as the author, performer, and grown-up person he is.

"Tower. And you?" "A regular ziggurat."

The title of my blog, Balm Carousel, was never really meant to make any sense -- it's a quote from Fawlty Towers that even most Fawlty Towers fans don't remember. But today I realized that, as I tend to come back to read and write in my blog when I'm blue or angsty, the blog does become sort of a revolving repository of things that make me feel better. But that's not what I logged on to say...

The other day I was poking around Stephen Fry's website (I've been addicted to watching QI episodes on YouTube since we got AppleTV last month; see forthcoming posts re: my emerging Alan Davies fixation) and I noticed for the first time that Stephen once recorded an audiobook of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales. This formed in my mind what Nabokov's character Ada Veen conceived as a tower: three especially beloved or meaningful things occurring together (the third thing, I suppose, was a set of sleep headphones that I found again while cleaning the apartment). Could it be that I might actually, if I chose, listen to beloved author and entertainer Stephen Fry read to me at bedtime from Oscar's fairy tales?

Most people who know me know that I've held up Oscar Wilde as a personal cultural icon from the time I was 12 or so. I'd already had squidgy popstar crushes on Donny Osmond and Elton John at roughly the appropriate ages, but I went pretty wack with Oscar: scrapbooks, posters, a shrine of sorts in my bedroom at home, and of course, lots and lots of reading (since he hadn't released any records for me to play, you see). One of the books I borrowed over and over again from the public library at that time was a volume of Oscar's fairy tales that was illustrated with attractive watercolors and bound in very pretty violet cloth. I hadn't thought about those stories for so long: The Young King, The Birthday of the Infanta, and my special favorite (Christian allegory notwithstanding), The Selfish Giant. The stories reveal a sensitivity, a non-cynical earnestness (!) that (as Stephen points out in an older post on his blog) many people don't really associate with Oscar.

Anyway, last night I had the chance to slip into the sleep headphones (these, if you're interested -- so comfy) and play the audiobook as I went to bed. And... I was weeping after the first few lines or so -- happy, and so overwhelmed with how sweet an experience it was to hear Stephen (whose work and life story and personality I've admired for years and years - got most of his books and everything) reading the Oscar stories I've loved for... well, decades. His voicing of each character was pitch-perfect, especially the Happy Prince's lilting "Swallow, swallow, little swallow." A high tower, truly. So thank you, Stephen Fry, for recording that audiobook (although I was a bit sad The Birthday of the Infanta was missed out). My next purchase will be Stephen reading Chekhov's short stories. Because... well, to be honest, it's because I read in Alan Davies' book that Chekhov is a favorite of his. (I'm hopeless.)