5277/18197
A glorious day on the island of Ireland today. Looking out the train window the countryside was so green, it almost seemed like it was being sarcastic.
There were no check points (for now) and no indication when we’d left the north, but it was good to be back in the EU (yes, I know). I should have made the most of Dublin in the sunshine, but after this long tour and stressful year, it’s all I can do to muster the requisite energy for the show. I had intended to go to the Leprechaun Museum which was over the river from my hotel, but I just wandered around in a bit of a daze before heading back to the room to lie down for a bit. I would never know the history of the Leprechauns. I regret my laziness. I have travelled the world and spent a lot of time sitting in hotel rooms and back stage in venues and not made much of an effort to see stuff.
I did sit down on one of the bridges for a while, wondering, as many visitors do I suspect, whether my Irish forebears had been here. My maternal grandad was called Hannan and his family came from Ireland, but I don’t know anything more than that. It’s enough to clutch at the straw that I am partly Irish and thus still slightly European.
I went to set up for the gig and then walked across the park to get some dinner. The people of Dublin were lounging in the evening sunshine. I noticed a sign saying “Please keep off the grass” in both English and Gaelic and enjoyed the fact that the locals were ignoring it entirely and keeping on the grass. Apparently in Gaelic it says don’t walk on the grass, which no one was doing - they were all sitting on it. And maybe they all rolled their way to where they were sitting. Could anything exemplify Dublin more than this sight? I am probably about one eighth Irish, so I know how these people roll. Literally roll.
And if I needed any further proof of what a great city this is, the venue was heaving with people who gave me the most incredible welcome and got all the clever bits and enjoyed me mocking their troubles and their history. Any weariness was swept away and I even had a pint of Guinness in the second half. If only I’d worn the national dress of one of those big green foam top hats then I think the locals would have accepted me as much as it was possible to be accepted.
I have been using the same apple and potato for several weeks now and the potato is pretty much green, apart from some little shoots coming out of it which are turning black and the apple had a strange smell and softness to it and a clamminess similar to the face of a dying man. There had been a bowl of apples at the hotel, so I could at least swap the fruit over for something less likely to explode in my pocket. It was a red apple, which was not canon, but it would have to do. Lucky that I changed it because at the end a young man told me that he’d been so starving during the interval that he’d eaten the apple. If he’d had the one that had been rolling around in my prop box for the best part of a month he may very well have died.
There was plenty of fun to be had at the expense of the guy who reported Stephen Fry for supposedly breaking the blasphemy laws, for something he said two years ago. I said a lot worse in the show, but it was gratifying to see how big a laugh I got for taking the piss out of the complainant, who wasn’t a Christian, but was doing his “civic duty”. What a cunt. As if stirring up something like this isn’t just a massive waste of everyone’s time and just an attempt to gain attention. But still I hoped I wouldn’t be spending the rest of my life in gaol for my criticism of the New Testament and the assertion of God’s mental illness.
The chances and leaps I took with taste and national pride were exhilarating. This is where comedy becomes something special. Where the room is so full of trust and understanding that you can say the most appalling things and everyone still enjoys it, knowing that the joke is inappropriateness and that it comes from a place of actual respect. You just need one or two dicks to misunderstand how humour (or really in the case of Fry, just philosophical discussion) works and thanks to social media there will always be one to two ready to leap in. But in a packed room of 220 people who all get what you’re doing (and where anyone who doesn’t is less keen to
