Warming Up

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Tuesday 2nd August 2005

Ah the joys of the Fringe. I had a photo shoot today to accompany an interview that I did for Fest (a newspaper that comes out four times during the Festival which is given away free to everyone who wants one) last week. I was meeting the photographer outside Sainsbury’s Metro. I had imagined that maybe she wanted to go inside and take a photo of me near to the yoghurt fridge, possibly caressing the yoghurts. You can imagine that for someone like me, who doesn’t like yoghurt all that much this would be a chore and not something I had been really looking forward to all day.
When I got there though the woman taking my photo said she had had the idea of taking my picture holding on to some fish.
“Because my name is Herring?” I enquired.
“Yes,” she replied.
“I get it,” I dead-panned.
Ten years ago I would probably have got all precious and said I wouldn’t do something like that, but I thought, what they hey? It’s not something that I have ever done before weirdly enough, but it might make a funny photo, especially given my new trout whore bit, that I am sure this photographer was not aware of.
We found a quiet corner and she got the fish out. For some reason I had been expecting her to have plastic fish, but they were real fish. Proper unfilleted fresh mackerel. “Couldn’t you get any herring?” I asked.
“They only had filleted ones,” she replied, “They didn’t look like fish.”
“But people will look at it and say Richard Herring, holding some mackerel? I don’t see what is funny about that. There is no delightful visual pun.” I warned her.
“We’ll have to take our chances on that one.”
She wanted me to hold the slippery, smelly, dead mackerels over my face, so that their eyes would be in front of my own eyes, so that essentially I would have fish eyes. I tried to work out how they might use this in a negative way to make me look like an idiot, but decided that just by doing it I was pretty much already saying I was an idiot so I should let it go. And there was a chance that it might look amazing. And I couldn’t be bothered to argue so I just got on with it. If the fish had known that they were giving their lives for this, do you think they would have felt their deaths were worthwhile? But if they could have known and understood this they would be some kind of super intelligent, prescient fish and would probably have been able to escape and conquer the world giving rise to a Planet of the Mackerels scenario.
I gave the lady her fish back at the end, so maybe she went home and ate them, even though I had been pressing them up against my dirty face (well it was dirty now that it had had fish all over it).
I went to Harvey Nicks to wash my fishy hands, feeling slightly dirty, but it was a dirt that could not be washed off even in a posh shop’s lavatories. It was a mark on my soul. Or should that be on my sole? No because they were mackerel and my name is Herring, the pun does not work.
After years of pretty much ignoring the fishy connotations of my name I had finally succumbed to an incorrect visual pun involving my piscine friends. And I do do a joke about it in the show too. I always have my funny name to fall back on if all else fails. I’ll put up the photos if she emails them to me as promised and as soon as I am back home will scan in all Edinburgh articles for your perusal. You can see the photo here.
It reminds me of all the times that people assume that Richard Herring is just my stage name. As if I would make that up thinking it was a really funny comedy name to have. That would be tragic.
By the way, as I type there are plenty of tickets left for the first few cheap performances of the show, even though the internet allowance has been sold, so if you’re in town already do come and see it sooner rather than later and save yourself some money. There’s a new lift in the Pleasance Above which means there is disabled access, which is very good news given that I am supporting SCOPE with the programmes. Also if you are not yet disabled (my favourite name for the non-disabled – much better than abled), but really lazy you could always save yourself the walk up two flights of stairs.