I hadn't slept all that well last night and had a bit of a hangover from the too much booze, so maybe that didn't make the Easyjet experience as easy as it might have been. Although it had been fine on the way here, at Amsterdam once we were through check in, we were herded (and the animal analogy is a correct one) into a small room with no seats (apart from for the people who had paid for priority seats) and had to stand for a good 30 minutes in close quarters, whilst we waited for our plane to arrive and then hastily cleaned, deloused and generally turned around for the next flight. I know this is how they keep the prices cheap, but I just wasn't sure how necessary the standing in lines actually was. There wasn't even any bin porn to keep me occupied.
I chatted to Nick Helm about other comedians and the business in general and we passed the time in our own little world, but then the man behind me yanked at my arm and said, "Excuse me, are you the buy who motorcycled around the world with Ewan McGregor?"
This misidentification has happened to me before, when a man congratulated me on "The Long Way Round" and I had no idea what he was talking about and it was funny that it happened now in front of one of my peers. But I tried to front it out politely and replied, "No, no I'm not."
The man seemed unsure as to whether I was telling the truth - he might even have asked if I was certain, which I was. I told him that this happened before, but Charlie Boorman was in fact well over six foot tall (and I might have added in no way as beautiful as me) and so I really wasn't him. We joked a little about me making a living as a lookalike, but the man was clearly fishing and had recognised me as someone and was curious as to who it was. But I was giving him little in the way of help. The rules of spotting a minor celebrity are , if you name them correctly then they have to speak to you for at least 30 seconds, but a misidentification is a faux pas and you can be shunned as a result. I wasn't going to help him out with this. I didn't want Charlie Boorman's scraps. He even had the audacity to say that he had overheard us talking about TV, which is why he'd thought I might be the guy who motorcycled around the world with Ewan McGregor. That seemed an amazing route for him to take. I mean, fair enough, he might have accidentally eaves-dropped in these crammed circumstances, but to admit that he had been tuning into our conversation and then use it as leverage. There was no way I was telling him who I actually was. He had embarrassed himself -and he didn't even know it.
We were having a small house party tonight and the theme was "Come as your teenage self". I hadn't been sure what to wear. I was certainly not a trendy teenager and probably wore my school uniform most of the time at that age, and I don't have any item of clothing that survives from that time (apart from, I remembered later a jacket I had worn when I worked at Camp America which had been nicely drawn on by a friend and made me a member of the fictional and evil Black Cs). I recalled that me and my friends actually favoured making an anti-fashion statement by dressing not as New Romantics like the "cool" kids, but buying old men's jackets and kipper ties from charity shops. On one occasion (at least) we had donned this garb and some of us (maybe not actually including myself- memory is a strange thing, but I have a feeling I might have been too square to actually join in) had worn several ties at once. So in memory of that night, regardless of my involvement I decided to do the same for the party. It was quite a look. No one believed that I had dressed like this, though Ben Moor and Phil Fry who were contemporaries did seem to recall it being the kind of thing I would do. I quite liked it as a look, but it's also funny that we thought we were somehow rebelling against convention back then, when we were just being pricks. But thank God we were such pricks, because it's super funny now.
I managed to stay up til about 2, which was actually 3 Dutch time, but then with the party still in full swing I went to bed, aware of how exhausted I was and a bit scared about what I had to achieve. Though I felt pretty certain that enough had happened on the Dutch trip to give me a good head start on the podcast.
