I needed a holiday and today is the closest I am going to get for a while. I was up early to head to Stanstead to get a flight to Amsterdam, not to smoke spliffs and fornicate with prostitutes, but to bring half an hour of my stand up comedy to the Amsterdam Comedy Festival. If I was being sensible I could probably have done without this distraction and disruption, but I was actually quite looking forward to the trip and having a few beers with some other comics. I haven't cut loose for a while.
I bumped into comic Nick Helm at the airport and realised that if this plane went down the future of British comedy would be largely unaffected and possibly slightly improved by our loss. That's not fair - Nick, at least is a very promising comedian. But looking around at the other passengers boarding this Easyjet flight I thought it might be worth his death if we could eradicate the others. I don't think many of the groups of men were planning on visiting the Van Gogh Museum this Bank Holiday weekend. In the bin by the departure gate someone had thrown away a porn mag - like they had needed that fix to get as far as the airport, but now they were so close to the Red Light district that they could almost smell it (eughw!)they could unload the pornographic images that had got them this far. The porn mag was open and a sad eyed, topless woman stared out amongst the rubbish. I would have been a gentleman and rescued her from this humiliation, but I didn't want to be recognised by anyone and become known as the Bin Porn Comedian, a man so desperate for masturbatory material that he would take discarded and second hand magazines. But what if a child had seen this thing? It was, I am sure, a moral maze. I left the magazine behind.
People were desperate to be at the front of the queue for the plane as EasyJet do not allocate seats, but Nick and me played it cool and waited in our seats- as he correctly reasoned we would still get seats, right. Then he seemed worried that we might not and we might have to stand. As it turned out, by waiting we avoided all the argy bargy and also found a row of 3 unoccupied seats and by leaving the middle one empty we gave ourselves the luxury of space. You only get choice if you get on last you idiots (unless the plane is completely full).
The flight was very fast and our car was waiting for us and we were soon at our hotel. I had been to Amsterdam fairly recently, but also didn't have time to sight see. I wanted to make progress on my Edinburgh programme and in fact by taking this trip to Holland I probably got more done than if I had just stayed at home - I think I would have slept for a lot more of the day if I hadn't been doing this.
The gig was a lot of fun. There were three venues set up in the same building and people had a choice as to which one they came to. I was in the biggest room and the audience were smart and polite and all seemed to understand English well enough to follow my sometimes verbose set. I enjoyed performing to a crowd who had mostly not seen me before and to flex my comedy muscles with a regular stand up set and it was definitely worth the trip.
Afterwards I sat chatting in a room with tattooed Chippenham ex-skinhead and Care Bear collector, Wil Hodgson, 65 year old spats and dress suit wearing trumpet impressionist Earl Okin and moody, giantess Ava Vidal, chatting about comedy and loving the fact that this group of odd and dispirate people had been brought together by this job. All of us, in our way, ridiculous oddballs, yet we'd found a career where we all fit in. This is a brilliant job, however much I slag it off and it just shows that eventually if you stick to your oddball guns you will find a place for yourself. Conforming is for schmucks.
I drank a few beers - probably more than I have had in a single night of my 44th year, but was still sensible enough to bow out as certain comedian's thoughts turned to going to see some live sex shows. The podcast Richard Herrin might be the kind of person to want to join them, but the real Richard Herring finds such things embarrassing and a bit odd and even six or seven beers down was sensible enough to know he had reached his limits and headed back to the hotel.
If only I had picked up that porn mag then imagine how my night would have ended. But I wouldn't have wanted to offend any of the women in the magazine by not being able to rise to the occasion after all the efforts they had gone to to please me and as it was I just fell straight asleep. So it's best that they stayed in the bin. That is less humiliating than out and out onanistic rejection.
