My bathroom contains a six foot square area of hotel toiletries, arranged over two large shelves, set in a westerly alcove. I have harvested the toiletries from hotels, bed and breakfast establishments, and motels over a fifteen year period of travelling the world as a stand-up comedian, during which I have spent approximately half of each year in strange rooms cleaning myself with soap I neither chose nor paid for. I now have more conditioner than I can use in my lifetime, especially as, at current rates of recession, I will be bald in thirteen years’ time. Then, if I continue to accumulate hotel toiletries with the same dedication I have throughout my adult life so far, I will be an entirely hairless man, like a speaking lizard or a shaven ape, with the world’s largest privately owned collection of hair maintenance products. Does this seem futile to you? Yes? Well, rest assured, in many ways it seems futile to me too.

My dedicated snaffling of soaps and shampoo has become compulsive. I have a system. On arriving in a room I immediately conceal all the available toiletries, so that any staff coming in at any time will be obliged to replenish them. Female travelling companions have, historically, complained that the toiletries they seek to use for their intended purposes are often hidden before they have even seen them. On long trips, such as the four months I have just spent in Australia and New Zealand, I box up all my hotel toiletries once every three weeks and mail them home to me in London via Sea Mail, the cheapest available freight method. This takes about three months, and can lead to delicious surprises. Only last week a crate of toiletries arrived from Auckland, mainly culled from the Heritage Serviced apartments, which I had quite forgotten ever posting. The staff at the Heritage had not been as generous as those at the Medina Grand Serviced Apartments in Melbourne, and I think they got wise to my system about ten days in, sometimes withholding their daily soap and shampoo stocks out of spite. Thus the toiletry haul from Auckland itself was not as big as it should have been, but was made up for by a night in a hotel in the Maori spa-town of Rotarura, where the comedians I was travelling with all gave me the contents of their rooms too.

The first time I ever stayed in a toiletry stocked hotel room was in April 1990, supporting the comedian Jerry Sadowitz, in Bradford. I was 21, and out on the road, and it seemed thrilling. I could not believe I was being paid to perform, and that there was free soap and shampoo thrown in. The toiletries I took home with me served, in some way, to confirm that this incredible state of affairs was actually real. But do not imagine that my toiletry collection tells the story of my career, from humble £8 a night rooms in the early 90’s in government subsidised doss-houses in Bristol or Glasgow, to the heights of five star luxury at the Four Seasons, Beverley Hills, or The Westin, Melbourne, courtesy of American television networks and Australian State Funded Arts Festivals. It does not. I abandoned any attempt at a chronologically ordered display sometime in the mid-90’s, when my then fledgling collection began to overwhelm the available space in the bathroom of the house I then shared with relative strangers, who I suspected of secretly using my toiletries for their own ablutions, rather than revering them as a icons in their own right.

And do not imagine that each of the sachets of shampoo, or individually wrapped tablets of soap, or tiny bottles of body lotion, tells a story, or sparks a Proustian reverie. To be frank, I remember little of anywhere that I have been. I do not look at a piece of Canadian soap and think, “Aaaah. Montreal! I remember. I remember the sweet smell of the blueberry muffins, the harsh but pleasing bite of cigarette smoke in my throat as I stood by the docks at mid-night, and the scent of Jessica’s perfume as we walked hand in hand over the disused railway line.” No. Instead, I merely think, “Ah. There is a piece of soap, piled up, with the others, in the soap section, behind the shower gel sachets, next to the mouthwash bottles.”

But there is a meaning behind this vast assembly of elegantly packaged slime. Do I have anything to show for the three seasons I was made to spend in LA, auditioning for parts as ‘eccentric British neighbour’ or ‘fish out of water type guy’ in sit-coms? Do I have anything to show for the trips I made to New York to meet Miramax about the funding of my never-made screenplay? Did my two years storming stages at The Montreal Festival amount to anything? Have a decade and a half of circuitous touring of the United Kingdom added up to much? Well, my London comedy circuit contemporaries Lee Evans, Eddie Izzard, Steve Coogan and Patrick Marber may have burgeoning pages on the Internet Movie Database, but I, only in my late 30’s, have already accumulated more soap, shampoo, body lotion, bath foam, conditioner, shower gel, mouthwash and mending kits than I will ever need.

How do we measure our success? By our bank balances? By the amount of power we have over those weaker than us? By the amount of love we personally spread around this wicked world? Or by vague, mutable notions of personal happiness? I have my own method, mine and mine alone, and on my own terms, I am ahead by a nose.