To be human is not in fashion these days.  Successful people like to think of themselves as an extension of their digital hardware, that they are the software like the <em>Wizard of Oz</em> was behind the curtain, playing God. There we are alone in the darkness on a constant drip feed of information either giving it or getting it. Nothing functions unless our fingers are clicking away giving our Facebook or Twitter followers a snippet of our lives or de-friending those we oppose. We're so pumped on this digital Viagra we feel if we go off line for a split nanosecond, the world will grind to a halt. The whole planet is waiting for us to answer the next email and so we spend our lives returning them only to get another one and another one like those horror films where the plants won't stop growing or the zombies won't stop coming. We made machines faster and faster with bytes beyond our dreams so we'd have spare time. Now we spend our lives keeping up with the machines. We wouldn't know what 'spare' was if it hit us in the head. It's as ridiculous as saying you need spare time as saying you need spare oxygen.  

And the less spare time you have the higher your social rating. Very few people will answer the question, "Are you busy?" With, "No." It would take a very brave person to admit they have an open slot in their calendar. Busy people would move away as if you had an infectious disease, faster than if you had Ebola. In this culture you're supposed to say, "Am I busy, are you kidding? I'm so busy I've had three heart attacks and I'm life support." Just watch how successful and popular you'll get if you have no time for anything or anyone.  

It's obvious our next step in evolution is that we become a cyborg where gradually our flesh will be replaced by silicon chips and steel pincers for fingers but hundreds of them to do all the multi-tasking we'll be forced to do. Then we'll be perfect, no physical or mental flaws, only a shiny silver carcass that says, 'Apple' where our hearts used to be. 

But for now we're just in the early stages of foreplay with our machines, we haven't been penetrated by them yet. We used to think of people who were alone talking to themselves insane, now it's a sign you're so important because people need you even when you're just walking. They need you because you are the source of all knowledge, a walking Wikipedia. 

Ok, so that's what not being human is  - which is sadly the predicament we're in today. To be human is to be able to say, "I screwed up. I don't know what I'm doing. I am scared. I'm lost." We are not made to know everything and do everything; to work a hundred hours a day, have 14 children, run a house, have a dog, know how to make a cupcake and jog at four in the morning.  These people are held up as role models; they should be burnt at the stake. We should admire people who can just stay in bed. We should say, "Wow, this guy can afford spare time, let's give him a knighthood." In truth when we meet someone who seems perfect, secretly we can't wait for their demise. If someone is flawed I know I am immediately drawn to him knowing he's like me underneath. Animals know what they're doing, they migrate thousands of miles to lay an egg and then come back again for some more random sex the same distance; no one complains. We, who don't have to swim, fly or canter a thousand miles, are dropping from exhaustion for no other reason than keeping up with the next guy who's keeping up with the next guy who's heading toward a full nervous breakdown and then nobody speaks to him again because he showed a flaw.  To be human is to stand up and claim your weakness. If you do that others around you will feel compassion and empathy, (little used features) and that's how the world will recover from its inhuman diseases of greed and narcissism - where a human being these days can actually believe he deserves over a £million in bonuses which defines the Frankensteins so many have turned into.here to edit.

In Edinburgh, not having a depression, no, this is a feeling and when you have a feeling you don't have depression. With depression you feel nothing, dead, frozen inhuman. There is no reason for this sadness; I'm doing my show, it's full, I don't forget my lines so all's good on that front. One of my adages is that it's not worth mentally hunting around for why you're sad; your body gives you information, your mind scrambles for an explanation, usually wrong because we've only got few thousands words and over 50,000 feelings. It's like translating Spanish and you only have the word "Tapas."

What happened to me is not the reason for my mood but I'm sure it contributed. My first night here I was invited to a dinner mainly for scientists who are up here doing a radio show. I'm placed next to Brain Cox and something inside me wilts because I know I am sitting next to a superior being and he will soon find out I'm a two-celled worm. I am next to someone who knows what happened to make the big bang, he sees atoms and electrons and even knows what they are. He doesn't think about things that I, a mere mortal does, like whether or not there is food on my teeth, and death. To me he is greater than any rock star squared.

You could say this is my imagination - and I know it is - but it's all I've got. This is my trigger, if I'm near someone that smart, I tailspin into the interior pre-recorded CD made in childhood that goes something like this, "You're a total idiot and people will find out that you're an idiot." (It's repeated many times). It was an early recording from around the time I came in last in my class in finger painting at nursery school. I also did not get into the swing of potty training till way after the time it was considered chic.

So there I was, hair-raised because the guy sitting next to me is (I have not gone on spell check which I usually have to every two words) a motecular genicist, astro physist, evolutionary something particale physisit, neruimmunionpiginy, quantum electrocardiologist with some string thrown in, he's beautiful and looks ten years old. At first I try to pull out something from the empty space called my brain; I give it my best shot. I say, tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth, "If there are infinite parallel universes meaning there are zillions of me's, how am I able to put food in my mouth with one fork?" He actually didn't look at me as if I was a dead bug I think he may have thought I knew something he didn't so he responded with something about fractals and particles, that I can exist here but also there. I laughed and said of course I know that and then began to sing show tunes from "Annie Get Your Gun" because Robin Ince, another genius on the other side of me, told me Brian liked those songs. I could tell Brian was confused but amused and then his wife phoned and among other things said she was thrilled I was next to her husband and told him to take a selfie. We pose for the photo and I don't want his head to touch mine in case I pass my idiocy into his.

Thank God I happened to have one of those small blow up Pilates balls in my bag so I put it to my mouth and blew it up for the shot. Brian held up a candle representing the sun or Lady Macbeth, I'm not sure. Anyway after the ice breaker we were fine. He told me about how nothing much happened on the earth for 3.7 billion years and then about 600,000 years ago when there was finally enough oxygen, a cell filled with mitochondria (I nodded as if I knew) from some piece of fungi started to breath in oxygen while another cell breathed out methane (I'm sure I got that wrong) and so complexity began and then he went all the way up to how us was formed. I had no cards to play because I knew I was that cell breathing oxygen but not much more.

I do have some features; I'm a good listener and can be extremely funny when I'm not nervous. So now he's included some older guy across from us in into the conversation about some LE173 gene that they found which determined how far that complex cell would migrate from central Africa to Egypt and the guy says how many of these LE438's could get that far? He asks me what I do and out of my mouth before I can pull the brakes out comes, "Model/actress". He laughs, I don't know why, and I'm thinking this guy is a mortal like me just listening to the Master speak but then Brain or Brian tells me this is the world's leading cosmologist. I shrivel. Carlos Frenk (look him up on You Tube, I did and almost choked to death). I didn't even understand his opening line, then holding up a squiggle on a piece of paper he told us in the language of math (which I do not speak) to take fluctuating space and multiply it by time. That was later, when I go home - but now, in the restaurant, he tells me that he was on a plane and was asked what he did, he said cosmologist and the person said, "Do you think I need a face lift?" I didn't think that was funny because that's what I would have asked. Then it gets worse he asks me where I think he comes from. I'm sweating. I say Hungary, no Brazil, to help me he tells me it's 29th latitude and 36 longitude so then I give up saying, "Ok you must be Mexican" and yes, that's what he is. Bingo. I then start to show off asking what town and I reel off Spanish names some of them are in Argentina but by now he thinks I'm funny so I'm riding high on my stupidity. At the end of the night I think I got a D for effort. I went home and, as I said, Youtubed Carlos Frenk all night until the electricity ran out and I woke up knowing nothing, nothing. This re-telling of my evening is not about wanting your pity; this is just a sharing of the inner landscape of my mind or whatever's in there. Thanks.

I'm in Edinburgh with my Sane New World Tour this week and I'll be touring the UK this Autumn. You can find full details here.