For the first time all holiday I managed to sleep in until after 7am, getting up at 9 and heading down for a late breakfast. We then walked the few steps down to the beach, rented loungers and stayed there all day reading and taking the occasional dip and watching the fools taking their lives in their hands by going up on a parachute attached to the back of a speedboat. I slightly envied them and wished I had the balls to do exciting stuff like that too (I know I did an actual parachute jump once, but that was a rare blip of bravado in an otherwise cowardly life). But I was quite glad that I am a chicken when late in the afternoon I saw the parachute veering rather wildly and rather close to the ground, sweeping towards the beach. People scattered and I thought I was about to witness some high speed mashing, but the man whose job it was to cling on to the back of the parachute and steer it (I thought I had a weird way to make a living) managed to regain control. It looked properly dangerous, but knowing my luck I am the kind of person who will spend their life avoiding such thrilling peril, but end up being getting my head knocked off by some other idiot who is less of a pussy and whose parachute is out of control.
Apart from that though the most exciting thing that happened was me and my girlfriend buying a mid-afternoon Cornetto each, in another unconscious echo
of my trip to Phi Phi in 2007. I read two books today which thanked Emma Kennedy in the acknowledgements (Emma seems to have befriended every modern day author of humorous books, whilst I remain useless at networking or making friends - it will be either my downfall or my triumph) - I read the last couple of chapters of Caitlin Moran's "How To Be a Woman" which I had massively enjoyed, but got distracted from and failed to finish a few months ago and then moved on to
Jon Ronson's "The Psychopath Test" which I got through in pretty much one sitting. Possibly it was a mistake to be reading a book about mental illness with Me1 vs Me2 snooker so fresh in my mind, but it's an interesting look at how madness is defined and the way TV entertainment at the moment revolves around people who are mad enough to amuse us, but not so mad that it feels properly exploitative and wrong (even though the former is still both of those things). It does make you start to question if you know any psychopaths. It's tempting to imagine that you do, but as a comedian (and one who skirts around issues of where his own sanity and madness begin and end) it's pretty likely that I am friends with quite a few people with borderline to serious problems. Me2 for example.
I started wondering if comedians who I might have had issues with might actually be psychopaths and the bullying, lack of empathy and manipulative skills that many of them have makes it easy to jump to that conclusion. But the difficulty of diagnosis is what the book is about. Still he is a psychopath though isn't he? And him too.
Ronson also discusses the awful case of the innocent Colin Stagg and the honey trap that was set for him to try and get him to admit to a horrendous murder. I had no idea how ham-fisted this had been and Ronson quotes from the letters and the responses. It's hard not to laugh at how desperate the police attempts to ensnare him are and how prosaic and innocent his responses. One letter from the policewoman pretending to be a woman in to perverted sex talks about how she was part of a Satanic coven where a pregnant woman and her baby were slaughtered and everyone drank their blood and then they all had an orgy and the letter says she would only love a man who had done something like that. Stagg replied "I think you're aiming a bit high."
I caught up with my blogs and in doing so had to search out the theme tune to the Lost Islands, which was a ridiculous thing to do as it meant I got that tune stuck in my head for the rest of the night and began questioning the lyrics
"There once was a wealthy man who had a wonderful idea".... not that wonderful was it, as it ended up with five of the kids being stranded on an island with loads of crazy people who were stuck in the 18th Century
"To take children from all places, with all kinds of faces" - probably not all the kinds of face you could have which would need a big boat. And the five that got ship wrecked didn't really show much ethnic diversity - was it all kinds of faces, but not black ones obviously.
Was it wise for them to take to the lifeboats when the United World was clearly sea-worthy? Did the adult supervisors get into a lot of trouble for leaving five people on board - I mean even if there wasn't time to count them all they should have had an idea of who was on the ship.
I then had to watch an episode of the show to try and see what it was all about and I have to admit it was a neat trick to have such an expansive and all encompassing theme tune because it meant they could cut straight to the chase. It wasn't very good, but there was a fun bit where the kids were being attacked by crabs. I wanted to know if they ever escaped the island and I couldn't be bothered to watch every episode, but the internet is surprisingly useless on this. The wikipedia page says there were 26 episodes and there is another website that gives brief summaries of each of them. I suspect that it was left open ended and then not picked up. Are those kids still stuck there?
Unusually too the cast don't feature on any of those "Where are they now?" sites. I wonder where they are now. I hope they're still on the Lost Islands - the actual people I mean, not the characters - waiting in the hope that the series will be picked up again. "We'll give it one more year and then I am going to go home."
I wish I had never remembered the Lost Islands. It might become my new Goodnight Sweetheart.
I know many of you in Ireland have voiced annoyance that I haven't ventured over in a while. Well good news!
A late addition to the tour dates is Friday 6th January at Whelans, Dublin. I will add booking details to the tour page as soon as I have them. You can find all the tour dates
here.
