I was very glad that I had made the decision to fly to Inverness, not least because I didn’t have to leave my house until 2pm, which felt reckless and dangerous – surely I couldn’t be in the North of Scotland by evening time. But that’s the beauty of air travel, which for my mind, makes up for the destruction of the earth that it causes. As long as I can travel 500 miles in an hour and a half, I don’t care if there is nowhere left to go to.
In seriousness it isnÂ’t something I would do very often, but it certainly made sense today and saved me killing myself and several innocent motorists by driving that ludicrous distance.
At the airport I had the thrill of being suspected of being a terrorist. At least when I put my plastic bag of toiletries through the scanner, a man picked it up and asked “Who owns this?”
“It’s mine,” I said.
“I am going to have to test it,” he told me, “Follow me over here, when you are ready.”
How exciting. You might think that the airport security was just randomly checking passengers, but I think that they had a strong suspicion that something was awry with my small bag of toothpaste, aftershave and moisturising balm. I was giddy. What if it turned out that I was a terrorist? I wasnÂ’t entirely sure at this point that I wasnÂ’t. I almost confessed. These people are good.
But he tested my moisturising balm on a piece of litmus paper and it didn’t go blue (so I guess that means it wasn’t alkaline) and I was free to go. “But you haven’t tested the toothpaste,” I felt like saying, “What if it’s Semtex? Come on, do your job!”
But I didnÂ’t, because even though I wouldnÂ’t have been joking, they take jokes like that very seriously at airport security and I might have missed my chance to entertain the few people in Inverness not put off my cheeky child-killer antics by Colin Campbell.
This had never happened before and I asked the man if security was especially tight today, but he said that this was normal procedure and that one conveyor belt was scanning shoes and the other one concentrating on liquids. As you choose your own queue this seemed a bit of a short-sighted policy, meaning the terrorists with the shoe bombs need only go right, whilst those with shampoo bombs could elect to go left, but itÂ’s not my place to tell them their job. I also wonder what is to stop terrorists filling the bottom of shampoo bottles with explosives and then put a little bit of shampoo at the top, maybe with a little bit of plastic in between to stop it all mixing. But again I didnÂ’t want to ask that in case he then decided to squirt out all my moisturising balm, meaning I couldnÂ’t soothe my face and body later.
So unless I had put a special divide in my bottle or had put my explosive in the toothpaste it turned out that I wasnÂ’t a terrorist, which was both a relief and a slight disappointment at the same time.
Whilst I waited for my plane and then during the ridiculously brief flight I wrote the copy for the back of my Edinburgh leaflet. HereÂ’s what I went for:
“This can’t be happening!
Just yesterday I was 20, it was 1987 and I was performing in my first Edinburgh, then I blinked and bang, IÂ’m 40, itÂ’s 2007 and IÂ’m doing my 23rd show at the Fringe
It must be a dream. I canÂ’t be 40. I still feel like IÂ’m 20. As long as I am not walking up some stairs.
IÂ’m like one of those people who fall into a coma and wake up to find that they have missed 20 years of their life, except I havenÂ’t fallen into a coma. IÂ’ve been awake for at least eight hours a day, every day for the last two decades and yet still I hadnÂ’t spotted the sands of time swirling away. Or that Margaret Thatcher is no longer Prime Minister.
And IÂ’m still single, IÂ’ve never been married, IÂ’ve got no kids. Have I wasted my life?
I canÂ’t be 40. IÂ’ve spent my whole career refining this puppyish, puerile, eternal teenager character and yet now when I look in a mirror I see a wrinkled, grey haired, gonk-faced old man staring back at me. I am in danger of becoming the English Wee Jimmy Krankie. Except I would never marry my own brother. Scotland should not be allowed independence until it has sorted out its archaic marital laws.
Is it time to finally grow up and get out the pipe and slippers and await the blessed release of death? Or does life really begin at 40, giving me the excuse to go around in nappies and make jokes about poo and wee for a good three years to come yet?
Richard Herring (along with his erstwhile double act partner Stewart Lee- whatever happened to him?), created the cult classic BBC2 shows “Fist of Fun” and “This Morning With Richard Not Judy”. More recently he has written and starred in ITV1’s “You Can Choose Your Friends”, Radio 2’s “That Was Then, This Is Now” and Radio 4’s “Banter”. His many past Edinburgh shows include “Ra-Ra-Rasputin”, “Excavating Rita”, “Christ On A Bike”, “Talking Cock” and last year’s sell-out, award-winning, smash “ménage à un”.
“Very Clever” **** Scotsman
“Terrific” **** Guardian
“Herring is still a big fish on stage” **** Metro
Winner not.bbc.com Best Live Comedy Show 2006”
Because I had left booking my hotel until 1am this morning I had been left with no choice of where I stayed and I ended up in another quite posh manor house style hotel outside of Inverness. I think it’s fair to say that I wasn’t its typical client. However, even though the room was only £98 (quite expensive, but not as bad as I had feared) I ended up in one of the garden suites, which was in a cottage a short walk from the main building. It had a small lounge, a bathroom and a bedroom, then upstairs a second bedroom. This seemed to be rubbing my singleness in my face. Oh great, a choice of beds to masturbate alone in. As the gig didn’t start til 9 and I was at the hotel by 6, I decided to have my dinner there – having learnt nothing from
my recent stay in a castle, where I ate too much and felt sick.
As I went to reception to ask if they could book me a cab to the venue, another hotel guest was talking to the young man at reception. “As you know. the bank I work for have put me up here whilst my flat is being repaired, and my fiancé is here tonight and I just wondered if I would have to pay any extra for him to stay in my room with me tonight.”
“Yes, you would,” said the gawky, obsequious youngster, “It would be £99.”
The woman was visibly shocked and so was I. It was costing me less than that to stay in a two bedroom cottage on my own, and yet here she was being charged that amount for having someone else share her room. Aside from having breakfast and maybe using an extra towel and a small bottle of shampoo, what expense was this causing the hotel? She was obviously quite a long term guest and had been polite enough to request whether this was possible and was obviously willing to pay a supplement – but £99. That was taking the piss surely.
“Really,” she said, “Even though he would be sharing my room.”
“Yes,” said the boy, giggling nervously, realising I hope that this was entirely unreasonable and stupid, but then confidently asserted “Ninety-nine pounds for bed and breakfast and £129 with dinner.”
To me this seemed an offensive and self-defeating policy. As a solo traveller it’s an arrangement that suits me – usually if anything you have to pay more for taking up a double room on your own – but it clearly isn’t twice as expensive for two people to stay in one room and no-one is going to pay that. If he’d said it would be £25 more then the woman would doubtless have gone along with it, though maybe thinking that was a bit much for breakfast, a clean towel and some shampoo. But by insisting that it was £99 more, in what were clearly special circumstances, all he was doing was ensuring that she snuck her boyfriend into the hotel later and he stayed there for nothing. And good luck to her with that.
The gig went fine, despite
Colin CampbellÂ’s disapproval. It was in the Ironworks which is really a music venue and the hall was large and echoey and pretty cold. But a hundred or so Invernessians had turned up to see the man who thought child killing was amusing. I made reference to the article and to Colin CampbellÂ’s stupidity, telling them I was going to push it further than normal to night in response. Colin had been invited along to see the thing that he had judged unseen, but didnÂ’t show up, which was brave of him.
Things ticked along nicely, but when I got to the stuff about stigmata loving I was able to chastise Campbell for getting it wrong, arguing from the point of view of an aggrieved punter that there was no jokes about child killers like he had promised (Maxine Carr has killed no-one) and that in fact there was a far more offensive thing at the end of the first half that he hadnÂ’t even bothered to make note of. Now that would have been something worth protesting about and might have got more people out picketing the venue, than the nought people who actually turned up. Poor old Colin Campbell, what a dolt. He had the chance to break the story of his paltry life and he got on the wrong train.
