What’s that saying? ‘There’s always someone better off than you.’ No, that’s not it. But you know what I mean – ‘there’s always going to be someone ahead of you being more successful.’ Hmmm. That’s a bit clumsy. I think it was one of my Nan’s sayings. ‘You’ve got nothing.’ Yeah, that’s it. Admittedly she wasn’t well at the time and was saying it to everyone, but it rang true yesterday.

I went around to my friend Josh’s house to watch DVD’s. In a boldly idiosyncratic gesture, I grabbed some leftover kangaroo steak (it’s the new beef) and vegetables and put them in a plastic bag with intent to cook over at his house. I added butter, salt and parsley to the potatoes, shook them around, and dished up. Josh popped on The Boosh series two. I chewed and chewed, but suddenly everything tasted desperately plain.

I was already plum jealous of Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt. Series One had firmly established itself as a groundbreaking, aggressively playful, genre bending maelstrom of whimsical, cerebral dialogue, pseudo schlock horror, boldly surreal plotlines, dangerously accomplished music, and two of the coolest, most likable and effortlessly hilarious stars since The Goodies and Monty Python’s lovechildren formed a spin off that only screened on the channel of your dreams.

And now, the bastards have gotten better.

As I watched the dramatically natural progression in script and music production values, my face grew as pink as my steak, a mixture of rage and embarrassment. Another friend had once spoken of this experience. The concept of enjoying a piece of art so much it makes you depressed, at the realisation that under no circumstances will you ever be able to create something as good. (His weakness had been the film Magnolia, which he could not bring himself to take out of its plastic cover. He hadn’t even watched it, based on the inkling that it could destroy him.)

This theory could be criticised as being pathetically defeatist and self obsessed. Why on earth would you make someone else’s artistic triumph all about yourself? Surely part of the basic quality of life is being able to spectate comfortably from the couch of perspective eating a warm meal of self-assuredness? Surely. Surely no one is that needlessly insecure and fallible.

Yep. Captain Jealous and Inferiority Boy were in full swing. I suddenly felt real lame. The Boosh was so funny, clever and aesthetically on the pulse that it ripped through the library of my mental back catalogue like a cyclonic psychedelic tidal wave of English brilliance, leaving my meager writings and primitive songs sodden and scuffed. They had made the art that I would have made if I was them! For God’s sake. Think about that! As if their characters and unassuming dialect isn’t enough, even their music is better than mine – AND MUSIC ISN’T EVEN THEIR GENRE! That’s just…rude.

There’s always going to be someone more successful than you. Whether its that band, that actor, that guy at work, that cousin – it’s a universal law, right down to Pluto getting jealous of Earth because its bigger and more popular. At the very least it makes us realise that we’re always striving to improve ourselves, and are generally just needy little egomaniacs. Was that the point? I’ve forgotten. I’ve gone wrong. I’ve gone wrong in the mind tank.