Long Goodbyes

“In Russia we have a saying that it’s bad to have long goodbyes…”

After a month performing at the Edinburgh Fringe (or the Edinburgh Bangs, as I imagine Americans call it…), it wasn’t a long goodbye. I left Edinburgh in my maroon Renault Clio (curiously branded ‘Extreme’, it’s not a very extreme vehicle — Clio ‘Moderate Fuel Consumption’ would have been a better epithet) at about 11am, having said goodbye to the two Russian friends present. The reason I was bidding farewell to a pair of Russians, in Edinburgh, was that they’d taken me in when I’d been kicked out of the flat I was using (a long story involving £20 and a bathroom sink) and so it was they who saw me off.

Now the long goodbyes thing is good advice as far as it goes, but, if you’ve had six hours sleep, a much better piece of advice is: don’t drive for TEN HOURS. It was a maddeningly surreal experience, which led me to two conclusions:

1. No human being should listen to Radio One for that long outside of some sort of bizarre CIA torture program, and even then it’d probably be kinder to water-board them. Unfortunately, water-boarding, much like the majority of satanic rituals, somewhat conflicts with the ability to see whilst driving.
2. Service stations are like being in a sort of dream, but not a kind of ‘Kubla Kahn’ fantasy type dream, more like an averagely weird dream being had by a guy from Billericay on a Wednesday night. I think a memo must have been sent round saying that every service station must have a Burger King and a gambling arcade, because they all do. Now, whilst Burger King might be unpleasant enough to make Gordon Ramsay gouge out his own cerebellum with a blunt pencil in front of an assembled crowd of schoolchildren, it is at least food — you get hungry when you drive a long way and you need to eat something, it’s logical to have that at a service station. In fact, a kind of weird optimism pervades the service station Burger King, at Newcastle services I was asked: ‘Is that to take-away?’ — Take away? Whither, my good man? Do you know of an excellent picnic spot along the hard shoulder of the A1? A place where I can watch elves and fawns dance beside a magical spring whilst eating my various grease based purchases? For verily it would be a disgrace to eat such a majestic foodstuff as the McWhopping-Chicken (may as well be the real name) in a service station cafeteria! Or maybe he just thought I could drive and eat at the same time, I can’t do that, I sometimes struggle to breathe and see at the same time, especially if being water-boarded (I won’t mention water-boarding again).
   And so to my next point: why the gambling arcade? Are there hordes of people for whom driving is a prompt into a sort of risk-taking frenzy whereby they must play slot machines before finishing their journey to Skegness? Have they not already lost enough money on petrol and an £8 Burger King? If these people exist we should be offering them medical help.

So now I’m home and, as always when I’ve been allowed to fend for myself for any substantial period of time, I am now gravely ill. By gravely ill, I of course mean that I’m a bit ill — like, ill enough to go to the doctor but not ill enough to be croaking platitudes at people in hospital, people whom I believe to be my relatives, but are in fact underpaid cleaning staff with little knowledge of English…much like my relatives (a joke, there). Essentially, this means I’m spending most of my day shut up in my room ruminating on the past month, and eating cake. It’s mostly cake.

Obviously, this meant thinking about how my show went — and I’m aware nobody wants to read about how everything went well and what nice things some people said about it (I mean, ugh. Disgusting.). So, seeing as I don’t really ruminate on that anyway, I’ll examine the soul-blackening limbo that is flyering. Because flyering is all about promoting your show to strangers, in a street, whilst being enthusiastic in the face of rejection, being ignored and, usually, rain. I can do that: I’ve pretended to be cheerful in nightclubs for most of my adult life and I can power through being soaking wet because I didn’t take any waterproof clothing or shoes to Edinburgh (I legit got a 2.1 in Classics from Cambridge, yeah I don’t know how either, probably an administrative error).

But what I feel I don’t have to put up with is people being deliberately rude. I’m not talking about avoiding or ignoring me, or just saying no (that would simply put you in the category of ‘all the people I’ve ever loved’ — too bleak? Also not true, I’m far too middle class to believably feign emotional traumas)— I mean people who actively went out of their way to stamp on the tatters of my sanity and/or extremely wet suede brogues. So, being a feeble man-boy comedian, I shall retaliate the only way I know how: by mocking them after the event from a safe distance. Here are three stand-out examples:

1. I saw a fifteen-year-old (ish) child (adolescent? Whatever they call feral youth these days) take a flyer from a guy stood next to me and throw it on the ground right in front of him, before showing him a smug grin. Despite being staunchly against the death penalty, I found myself wavering with regards to this particular fecal-stain of a human being; the sort of child who sadly now has a much lower chance of dying in an industrial accident than he would have done 150 years ago — progress, what progress? (Yeah, ok, not really, but his mother should take away his nintendo or something until he learns that he is a cancer on society.)
2. The fat seemingly-lost man with a Fringe catalogue. So I see this guy clutching a Fringe brochure, wandering aimlessly and gazing about outside my venue, so I think ‘Say, here’s a guy who might come to a free comedy show!’ (my internal monologue is a kind of depression-era wise-cracking New York docker). I was wrong, so very wrong. What he said in reply to my offer of a flyer was “SOMEONE SHOULD BLOODY WELL CUT DOWN THIS BLOODY FESTIVAL TO A MANAGEABLE NUMBER OF QUALITY EVENTS THAT WE MIGHT ACTUALLY WANT TO PISSING WELL GO TO!” “Well, um, I’m not involved with organising the Fringe but it’s a good show and it’s free…” “ARGGHH!” …and with that, like an obese Keyser Soze, he was gone. Why was this man at the Fringe? It’s explicitly there for people to experiment with their craft, by its very nature it cannot guarantee quality but it gives the public a chance to broaden their horizons by seeing new performers and new styles… Or more to the point, why does this man exist? What kind of life does this man lead that gives him such pent up rage? I like to imagine he is a travelling salesman for various products that nobody needs, like mime-subtitling, living room tiles or owl shoes (I don’t know whether these are shoes for owls or shoes which look like owls but I want some, why is nobody buying these? It would ease this man’s torment.). He drives from town to town, never making a single sale, his family think he’s a failure — “Why will no-one buy my owl shoes!?” he weeps, as he lays crying in a bath in a Travelodge in Kettering, eating Mr Kipling country slices. Maybe, you never know.
3. But the crème de la crème of rude people was definitely the man I call: ‘The unsung wit of Manchester’. The reason he is the unsung wit of Manchester is that he’s from Manchester (I assume from the accent) and he thinks he’s a wit, but nobody else does — and the reason they don’t is that he’s a fucking idiot. This charming chap, when offered ‘free comedy from some of the Cambridge Footlights’ opted to reply with “No, I’m not a posh twat.” His friends laughed and laughed, “Ooh look, Nigel’s made a funny again, he must be getting over his moping about his erectile dysfunction and his wife leaving him for a badger carcass — what a hoot!” (reconstruction, not actual dialogue).
   Now, whilst I may be a twat, I’m not actually that posh and I resent being accused of either based on my university education, so, in reply, I said “What on earth gives you the right to say that?” (Ok, I didn’t really prove him wrong there) to which he replied “You’re from the south”. Ignoring the McCain production line of chips on this man’s shoulder, I just found myself wondering how this man had managed to never visit the south: the south has Basildon, BASILDON, Nigel! The place where Waitrose fears to tread! Go there, feast thine eyes upon it and shed tears. Actually, don’t. The good people of Basildon deserve better than you, Nigel. I’d rather have a visit from a thousand Piers Morgans playing vuvuzelas made of locusts and malaria than endure another five minutes of your company and I’m sure most Basildonians would feel the same way. I don’t think the guy’s name is actually Nigel, but you get the point.

I’ve probably rambled for long enough, I may have made a point at some stage but I think it was mainly just a vehicle for a surreal analogy. There will be more of these at some stage in the future, read them if you like, or follow me on twitter @Milo_Edwards, or both, or neither, or adopt a kitten or don’t — the world is your oyster.

Until then.