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Monday 20th October 2008

I didn't mean to be sexist or offend the people of Manchester yesterday. By no means all the women at the wonderful hotel I am staying at are skanky whores. This afternoon I passed an extremely attractive high-class whore coming down the stairs. And when I was out shopping in the wonderful IRA designed shopping centre I am prepared to concede that I might have walked by a few Mancunian women who have never been paid for sex at all. Hope that clears up any confusion.
I had hoped to get some work done today, but I had slept very badly in my tiny bed in my cold box room, and perhaps had one pint too many of Guinness last night and was consequently not in the right frame of mind. But I drank a lot of coffee and ate too many biscuits and laughed at the pathetic, miniscule, Mancunian attempt to rival the London Eye. I don't know why I am being like this. I actually really like Manchester.
I was staying up to do a gig in a little pub in Chorlton, which sounds like a made up place in a fairy story and can only make a person of my age think of Chorlton and the Wheelies (though my young crowd tonight either did not recognise the reference or had heard it too many times to be amused).
After a day of hanging around on my own in a bit of a funk there was a danger that the gig might have been a bit of a damp squib, but I got off to a confident start and then messed around a fair deal and the 55 minutes flew by. I picked on a pretty girl at the front to do my usual depraved lechery. She was 18 years old. At the end of the set I started doing increasingly old cock gags from my repertoire, discussing how old she had been when I wrote them. A couple of them predated her existence and I discussed where she would have been when I created them. The egg that was her, I opined, would still be in her mother's womb. I then corrected myself saying, "No, not womb, up her fallopian tubes or something. I don't know. I'm not interested in women's reproductive parts. It's only cocks that I am interested in. Men's big cocks." But then I pondered about where the genetic material that her father provided would have been three or four years before her conception. The constituent atoms would have existed in some form, scattered around the planet like tiny stars. The girl seemed to almost find this idea romantic and I had to remind her of all the horrible things I had said to her earlier in the gig. I reminded her that the person on stage was just a character and it was him making all the lewd suggestions, not me. But that I was prepared to stay in character for maybe half an hour after the gig if she fancied doing anything about it.
But luckily some of the women of Manchester and pure and principled and she somehow managed to resist this tempting offer from a leering buffoon some 23 years her senior. Who'd have thunk it?
Still it is interesting that the atoms of as yet unborn humans are scattered around the planet and maybe out in space. We are stardust.
When I got to the gig a woman had been sitting outside who said hello. "Don't you recognise me?" she asked. I didn't and frantically scanned my memory banks, hoping it wasn't someone I had had a six month relationship with who had now slipped my mind. It turned out it was one of the girls I had been drinking with when I got into my fight in Liverpool. I am pretty sure it is the one who precipitated the whole thing with her talk about racism. Who in the routine I did in "Oh Fuck, I'm 40" I say, "I was the only man there so it was my duty to protect this stupid and annoying woman... who I was still hoping to have sex with." I asked if she'd heard the routine and she said she hadn't, though some friends had told her about it. "I'll try not to get you into another fight tonight," she laughed. But I was a bit embarrassed, not because of what I say in the routine, which is really just a joke (the man who I fought was the one entirely to blame for what happened), but because it reminded me of my own stupidity at losing control and getting into a pathetic fight. I wondered if I should do the routine that night so she could see what I said, but as it turned out I didn't get the time to get round to it.
After the gig she had gone, so there were no opportunities to get into a fight, though I did get a lift home with another comic who I didn't know, whose passenger side door was defective, which meant I had to get out of the other side. It struck me that I was being quite trusting and if this stranger wanted to drive me somewhere other than my hotel then I would be entirely at his mercy. It's the kind of scam that a serial killer would pull. Still being murdered in a wood would have been slightly preferable to spending another night in my uncomfortable single bed in the whore hotel. Unfortunately I got away unscathed.

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