I sometimes wonder what my cleaner must make of my life from the clues available to her. I think she must be a bit confused. Last week I had received a BNP leaflet through the door and rather than ripping it to shreds (and then recycling it) I took it up to where I was working. I thought I might write a blog about it and its awful design and the way that it had two lots of quotation marks around its central message, "Because it's not racist to oppose mass immigration and political correctness - it's common sense!" even though the words were not attributed to anyone else. By having a small pair of quotation marks and over them a massive pair of quotation marks almost made it look like one of those ironic air quotes things, where you're essentially saying the opposite of what has been said is actually true. Which in this case is quite apposite.
In the end I decided enough people were writing about that leaflet, so didn't do anything, but I left the leaflet on my table top. My cleaner, who comes from Romania and is thus an immigrant - at least in the BNP's view - I know we're all immigrants and almost all related to those 100 African pioneers from 70,000 years ago - really if the BNP were doing their jobs they'd be promoting the rights of the Neanderthal people who WERE HERE FIRST, before all these homo sapiens immigrants started coming in.
My cleaner, perhaps upset, perhaps disgusted that I had this leaflet, neatly filed it away under the table. Does she think I am racist?
Added to that is the fact that in my bathroom I have a small stick on Hitler moustache, which I had for the photo session (though didn't need it in the end as my own moustache was good enough) and might use in the show. That might add to her concerns and judgement of me.
But conversely last time she was here she would have had to iron the two Dublin Gay Theatre Festival shirts that Andrew Ryan kindly sent for Collings and me to model in last week's podcast. Which sends out a completely different message.
What can she think it all means? Surely only that I am some kind of repressed Nazi who hates immigrants, unless they are gay in which case it's the more the merrier? Or does she just pity me because I am unable to keep my house even a tiny bit tidy and need to employ her to do it? The truth is no true British worker would want to humiliate themselves by having to clean my pants, so we need to bring in Romanians to do it - it's common sense.
The BNP should concentrate on creating a Jurassic Park of Neanderthals, where funnily enough they'd pretty much fit in unnoticed. Looking at them, perhaps they are the last survivors of that species who assimilated into our culture - in which case they might actually have a point. I say let's send them all to live in caves in Gibraltar and then invite more Eastern Europeans in to do the jobs we don't want to do, efficiently and at a low cost.
It might just work.
