Mankind

Suddenly writing when you haven’t done it for a while is an odd experience. I’ll know by the end of this whether writing about random words is like the proverbial riding a bike, or whether it’s like riding an elephant: you remember the fundamentals but when it comes to trying to actually do it suddenly its prohibitively terrifying. I’ve been away a long time. When I say that, clearly I mean in the figurative sense, because like everyone else I’ve been absolutely nowhere this year. But in my head I’ve been everywhere, including a lot of bad places – but before you start to fear for the levity of this piece, nowhere I couldn’t get back from. Except I’m locked out of one room. It’s marked “Concentration.” It doesn’t matter how hard I try to get in, the door won’t budge. I don’t know if it’s locked, or if the frame has swollen up in the unseasonably warm weather, or if there are dextrous antelope on the other side hitting nails into the door to keep it shut, but the result is the same: I can’t access Concentration. But I will admit, I’ve only tried the door I can get to via Work. It’s the most obvious one, has the shiniest handle and the clearest signage, but I need to try a different way in. Now, someone once told me that there’s a crawl space under Work called Silliness. Most people go there and just twit around, but if you stick with it you can eventually get to a trapdoor under Concentration and work your way up from there. And once you’re in Concentration, you’re in, and it doesn’t matter how you got there. So while the world burns and mankind throws itself into the flames of chaos, here I am writing a silly thing in the hope that I can concentrate long enough to achieve something, anything, no matter how utterly worthless, as long as it lets me use my random word and possibly mention “squirrel sex”, because I just wanted to. So there we are. And here I am. It worked. I’m 350 words in and I haven’t checked my phone or looked out of the window or wondered what I’m having for dinner (though I am a little peckish, hmmm). The quality – which, let’s be honest, has seldom been the purpose of this endeavour – might not stand the test of time, but the test of mind has been stood upon, and it didn’t squish. Hurrah. Now, what’s for dinner?

Impossible

The late, great Sir Terry Pratchett wrote that:

"It's OK! I'll keep it clean!"

"The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them..."

What Sir Terry didn't then expand on was that, to steal another (unrelated) Sir TP quote: "the process is called living."

Life is impossible at times. If you tried to look at it as a whole it would swiftly overwhelm you. And fortunately, the human brain knows this and does it's best to help you. When you get to the point in life when - terrifyingly - you could just about work out how the rest of it will pan out, you'll have forgotten so much of what you previously knew that you're still only getting the Executive Summary*.

That was a slightly morbid opening to a random word that could have had me talking about breakdancing unicorns and talking soap. And I would much rather be in the mood to discuss pirouetting elderberry fish, even if it meant looking up how to spell 'pirouetting.' But it's been a tough few weeks and I'm feeling like it would be impossible to be entirely lighthearted. 

But if the soap could talk, perhaps it would offer some wisdom. And if one breaks life into a series of horribly hard tasks, and then into tricky jobs, and then into merely tough moments, and then finally into grains of time, it's entirely possible that some of those grains will be happy, and dust your life with enough joy to make the big picture worthwhile. 

Because while it's sometimes tempting to conclude that it's all not worth the effort, it's impossible to know. 
* I forgot the name of someone I've known for more than 8 years today. I had to look them up on a website to put the name back in my brain. It was fairly humiliating, but - based on this evidence - I'll have forgotten about it by Tuesday. 

Role Play - My 5 Favourite Parts

This is a self-indulgent series, briefly taking over "Tramplings" in the absence of a better place for it. But most blogs are fairly self-indulgent, so now that this disclaimer is duly deposited I shall move on without further apology.

 I'm in the post-show glow/blues (take your pick) of a successful run as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. Frankly, it was a blast, every bit as much fun as I thought it would be when I signed on. It was, I reflected, likely to be in my top five parts - if only I could agree on the other four and which order they would be in.

So I had a trawl back through my theatrical history and worked out what they would be. The unlucky sixth was poor Captain Stanhope, but rather than ignore him I thought I'd give him some time in this intro; although I now seem to thrive playing oddballs, misfits, eccentrics and - in one case at least - a psychopath, it was the psychologically damaged but otherwise pretty-damned-straight Captain that set me on the path to the roles I treasure.

My list will also be unkind to the King of the Faeries himself. I've played Oberon twice and adore doing it, but if I'm honest the productions - a surprisingly cool VI Form effort when I was 17 and a far less cool foresty frolic in 2009 where I was forced to dress as a genie - don't really merit that much reminiscing. My list has forcibly ignored external pleasures and pains - I don't want to talk about fellow cast mates and the influence they had offstage, although inevitably that's always part of the fun (or otherwise), as I'd inevitably forget someone important and - despite the likelihood that no-one will read this - they'd get marginally miffed.

So, Stanhope. Until Journey's End, I'd mostly been cast as hilarious wacky buffoons, such as Dr Pinch in Comedy of Errors, or soppy idiots, like Cléante in The Miser. This was largely my own fault, since I had a long history of wanting to be funny. I was always on the look-out for any onstage silliness that I could get involved in, and for all that they say comedy is harder to get right than drama, it's also comforting and reassuring, because you can tell if you were doing it right.

Then a slightly histrionic turn* as Edmund the Bastard in King Lear, agreed to as a rare concession to being in a theatre group rather than an itinerant thesp (they needed men, I was one) got me an at least theoretical Shakespeare role, but most importantly drew me to the attention of Andy, who would eventually direct Journey's End. He contacted me months before he got anywhere near it, getting his (masculine) ducks in a row to make sure he could actually deliver on his promises to the group of putting on a play that needed several men, and good men at that. For some reason he'd decided (in the absence of any evidence that I was aware of) that I would be a good fit for Denis Stanhope, a broken 23 year old (I was 36) army captain in the front lines of the Great War, who was just about functioning in the face of constant death and violence.

Within the space of weeks I had to unlearn all my bad habits - silly voices, even sillier faces - and try to understand what would engage an audience without my usual box of schticks. I'm looking back 11 years, so forgive me if I'm foggy on the details, but I recall trying to use my style in reverse: pick a voice, stick to it, pick a face, keep it as a mask that only cracks when things are bad. I remember nicking Nickolas Grace's posh, drawn out accent as a basis, largely because no-one (including me) can ever work out where it comes from and because it works quite well for patronising people (it came in useful again for Don Juan) and bossing them around. Keeping my face still had added benefits - I was 36 playing 23, and nothing gives away the wrinkles (and flakes the stage make-up) like a good old facial expression. Presumably I delved a little deeper than that into this shell-shocked character, able to live with what he’d become until confronted by an unspoilt vision of his old self, but I’d be retro-engineering the part if I tried to explain anything here. I was a bit lost without laughs, hoping that whatever I was doing would turn out to be sufficient to match the skills of the other actors and – a stand out star here – the magnificent set that Incognito Theatre’s John Savage had created, with its tons of gravel and cleverly self-collapsing structure for the devastating final scene.

There are funny characters in Journey's End (2nd Lieutenant Trotter, for example, and Private Mason, the blueprint for the version of Baldrick seen in Blackadder Goes Forth), but - although he was once played by Noel Coward - Stanhope is not amongst them, especially once he finally loses his self-control in the face of innocent young school friend Raleigh who arrives having asked to be assigned to Stanhope. Stanhope's disintegration, made worse when he is effectively forced to sacrifice his men in a hopeless cause, was short on hilarity and therefore on the instant gratification of the audience reaction (apart from the few audience members who couldn't cope with the constant fog of senior service cigarettes that we were somehow allowed to puff away at for the whole two hours, and who reacted with impressively persistent hacking coughs).

Despite this, despite the fact that when required to break down in tears at the death of my right-hand man and best pal "Uncle" I had to turn my back on the audience so they couldn't see my resolutely unmoist visage, and despite having to drink so much fake whisky (peach ice tea) that I was in danger of bursting, I realised that laughs weren't everything.

* although I did enjoy the round of applause I got one night (I suspect I woke up the audience after King Lear’s lengthy opening scene) my Director proudly told me it attracted one comment from acting stalwart: “I thought Stephen overdid it a bit”. She was delighted to tell me this, because “I told him I asked you to play it that way.” I think she thought I’d be happy about this story.

Protruded

I'm in the middle of a health crisis.

Of course, for me, a health crisis is me thinking that I should have signed up to a local doctor. Every time this happens, the possibility gets seriously considered and then not acted upon, until the next time I have some unspecified malfunction and realise I still don't have a local GP.

On this occasion, a mole on my neck is suddenly very hard and sore, and probably not the sort of thing I should be ignoring. In all likelihood I caught it on something and its just damaged, but I've been repeatedly warned that there's the outside possibility of melanoma when things go wrong with moles, and now this one has protruded a little further than comfortable I should get it seen.

This will involve me phoning by old GP and desperately trying to remember my old postcode from 5 years ago when asked for my address. I just hope they don't have a ruthlessly efficient admin system that long ago clocked the "not known as this address" returns to sender and deleted me from the database.

The mole is on the back of my neck, so I've been reduced to taking pictures of it. It looks angry and sore, like a mole that's just lost at Monopoly using real money and been informed that the guy being the Banker was cheating and has run off with its life savings. However, it being on the back of my neck, I haven't looked at it very often, so for all I know it always looks pissed off. It can't be much fun being stuck on my neck. Even a bent game of Monopoly would be a happy diversion.

UPDATE

It all ended up making a weird kind of sense. I never made it to the GPs, handily, but the mole saga didn't just go away. Well, actually that's exactly what happened.

It turns out (I was going to write "transpires," but then I remembered this is supposed to be a fun blog, not a policy paper) that the reason the mole was so upset was that I'd slathered freeze gel on it in an attempt to soothe a stiff neck. The mole, clearly preferring tropical climates, had gone into a massive sulk and started playing up. Eventually I got fed up of its angry surface rubbing against my t-shirt and stuck a plaster over it. And that, dear reader, is the last I ever saw of Maurice the Mole.

By the time I removed the plaster a couple of days later that what had previously protruded was now nothing more than a brown circle on my skin, like one of the squashed dogs in A Fish Call Wanda. A few days beyond that, he'd gone, with only the slightest speck of brown to show he had ever existed. Admittedly I was in Geneva at the time, so I can't really blame him for running off.

Now, I have no idea of the science behind a disappearing mole. I'd been told - many years ago by my Mum, I think - that moles could be "frozen off," but had no idea of what that actually entailed. I always imagined something being ladled out of a pot that smoked like dry ice before being carefully applied. However, I can now state - anecdotally - that smearing a blue gel that smells of eucalyptus will have the same effect.

I'm not recommending it though. There's something so disconcerting about a part of your body squishing flat and disappearing, even if it's a mole. I shall be careful with my remaining subterranean mammals, just in case one day I need them to dig me out of prison. Or Geneva.





 

Article

I thought I’d revisit my old random word generator to see what it offered me: I got ‘article’, which doesn’t sound like the spark of life for a surreal rampage through my memories, but does seem fairy appropriate for a return to regular blogging.

I say regular – if this remains the most up-to-date post come July 3^rd feel free to slap me.

Even ‘article’ was a bit of a cheat; the first word offered was “brightness” which for all its light and fluffy connotations seemed even more vague and unhelpful, so I skipped over it, thereby trashing all the rules that I originally set up for Trampling (but since I broke them fairly solidly by not writing every day I probably shouldn’t worry too much).

Of course when I started The Trampling of Small Pigs there wasn’t much opportunity for writing in my life. The most exciting things I got to write were updates to government departments on how their money had been spent, which afforded fewer opportunities for yellow hippos and talking oysters than I would like. Now I get to write articles about human rights abuse in central America – strangely I’m still short on the talking oysters, but nevertheless it’s a marked improvement. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t been back for a while?

But as with everything, as soon as you start doing it for work it becomes hard work. If I was paid to drink Irn Bru I’d resent it by day three and start dreaming of Tizer. Frankly I’m perplexed by the right-wing tabloids: if thousands of “loafers” are indeed being paid by the state to not work, there ought to be an epidemic of volunteering as not working starts to feel like far too much hard work for all these apparently work-shy people.

But that might just be me.

Of course, to go off piste for a moment, the government would then sanction them for volunteering because if you’re helping raise money to stop old people from being made into kites, or whatever, you’re clearly not looking for jobs that don’t exist, and where would we be then?

So here I am, blogging ‘for fun’ and hoping that it actually is.

This article is a gentle reintroduction for me. Hopefully the benefits will become plain if I keep up some sort of momentum (keeping the Jeremy Corbyn of my motivation in charge of the hapless political party of my creativity). I don’t imagine this post itself will attract rave reviews, but since I don’t have an audience, at least it can’t put anyone off. See you “all” soon.

Noisily

[Due to general incompetence, I'm publishing this two years late. That's right. Two years. Actually, two and bit. Sorry about that.]

The world does not fit nicely into our plans. Things that seem a good idea at the time are often revealed as wildly optimistic hopes. In hoping for a lie in on my holiday, I have been made to feel that I was counting on a golden swan to deliver my shopping or firmly believing that one of my legs is actually getting younger while the rest of me ages.

Though I'm pretty sure that one of my legs *is* ageing faster than the other one.

I'm in Edinburgh performing in a play called The War of the Waleses, in which I play Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair. It's enormous fun to act in (and hopefully to watch), but it does have the slight draw back of going up at 10:05pm every night. We finish at 11:30ish, and we're at least 30 mins walk from our digs in leafy surburbia, so the earliest I could get to bed would be midnight, and that's ignoring the residual adrenaline rush of performing in front of more than 6 people and the siren voices of whisky bars. In addition to that, go to bed at 12 and my body will assume that 10:50 is the top of the gentle slope to unconsciousness, just when I need to be bouncing on as Blair and dishing out the 1996 conference speech.

So, the simple solution is just to play fast and loose with the old body clock and shift everything onto my own personal time zone.   Jet laggedly zigzagging my hours into a new format should be simple - we all do it at least twice a year. I'll put my own clocks back a couple of hours. What could be more simple?

Me, it seems.  If it wasn't awkward enough sharing a double bed with Alistair Campbell, who seems to have shifted *his* personal time zone enough to have him hanging around in the Caribbean, the good burghers of Edin have decided that the paving slabs on our said leafy crescent need replacing. For some reason, paving slabs need urgent attention at about 8:30 each morning, though you have to be nice to those precious grey squares, and you mustn't tire them out by replacing them after 2pm in the afternoon.

So, thanks to my zone shift, I now have workman digging up the road outside my room from 6:30 till noon. And then they fuck off home.

The most delightful aspect of this is that according to one of my cast mates, at least half the workmen are actually performing community service.  Probably for anti-social behaviour.

Bastards.

Reason & Sanity

Cheating, me? It's just that my random word generator, Watch Out for Snakes, is back! And oddly, the last word before it died was Reason, and the first it's provided now it's back is Sanity. They seem all bedfellowy together, so I thought I'd do both.

I don't have very much reason to doubt my sanity. I might have a blog called The Trampling of Small Pigs, and my girlfriend would point out that I talk to our foster cat by mewing so much that I sometimes meow at other people by 'mistake', but other than that I'm boringly shorn of the signs of madness. Or even the CDs of Madness. Frankly I'm beginning to worry that middle age is making me sane. I haven't had the urge to write a novel about a giant, orange, shape-changing peanut that fights crime for years.

I realise that, rather facetiously, I'm confusing "reason & sanity" with "having an active imagination", though the link between the two has long been a source of conjecture. Or, y'know, something that people go on about. I think it's using phrases like "a source of conjecture" that is probably eating away at my playful imagination like acid. Or worms. Formal phraseology is like some like of parasite that takes over your brain and makes you spout more formal phraseology, like that fungus that rides ants to the top of grass stems and makes them explode all over their ant friends to spread its fungal evil. Just like that.

If I were to make that analogy in a meeting about learning materials or corporate social responsibility, perhaps I'd get that satisfying look of fear from some stiff looking individual with sad eyes and a bluetooth keyboard; instead I'd probably just mutter about 'developing appropriate linguistic cues to establish societal norms' and look stiff and sad-eyed while tapping at my wireless keyboard.

But it's lovely to have the snakes back. Maybe they can eat the worms.

Bauble

With my favourite random word generator looking like it's been eaten by the Worm of the World's End, I'm left waiting for my Dictionary app to spit a random word at me. Today it spat a bauble at me, which could have been dangerous if it had been one of those delicate glass Christmas decorations. In a world become very conscious of health & safety (rightly, for the most part) it does seem out of keeping that we celebrate a great festival to be enjoyed by children by surrounding them with fragile glass and putting electric lights on damp pine trees.

I have a box full of the most delightful, timorously fragile Christmas baubles. Alas they've remained wrapped in cotton wool (or possible bubble wrap) since they were bought, because they're far too fragile to actually do anything with. Instead my Christmas decorations of choice are £4 fairy lights from Chapel Market and a load of tinsel. Interestingly (to me) although I never take the baubles out of the box, I never put the tinsel and fairy lights away, and they've been decorating my north London garret for months now.

I had tinsel wrapped round Easter eggs, tinsel glinting in the midsummer sun, soon I'll have fairy lights shining through the eyes of pumpkins. There is something eternal about tinsel, not least because it's made of plastic and probably takes about 50 billion years to biodegrade. I look forward to being reincarnated as a sentient crustacean in the year 34,005,455,343 and digging up the preserved remains of the Selfridges Santa's Grotto from 2073, the year human civilization was finally destroyed by an invasion of strange pink blobs descended from David Cameron's face.

And all the while, tucked away somewhere in a cave at the centre of the Earth, will be a small, never opened, shoebox full of shell-like baubles, marked 'fragile' in long dead marker pen.  

Snip

I had an ex-girlfriend - my first one, in fact - who refered to me by an inexplicable (to me) nickname. The relationship was short lived, so short lived in fact that I never got a straight answer to why she decided to call me "Cheese Snip*". And of course never will.

Being named after some sort of proto-Mini Cheddar has probably not scarred me for life, but I do seem to have attracted an enormous number of nicknames over the years. Not generally from girlfriends, I hasten to add - if they always had something mysterious and slightly unflattering to call me I'd probably worry. 

So I've been The Professor, Strider, Bob-a-long, Triffid, The Master Plaster, Potto, The Hustler, Marti, Rubbish, Naked Steve and, of course, Speedy. I'm fairly certain there are lots of others, but being of advancing years bits of my past are being erased as my former selves are taken out of time, so several of my identities are lost to me forever. Also, I'm unlikely ever to get called Marti ever again. Thankfully. And as for Naked Steve, my days of appearing on stage in nowt but a breech-clout are hopefully gone forever, like my ponytail.

* whatever it was, I assure you it had nothing to do with the entry on Urban Dictionary. Eww.

Frenzied

I've been awake for 6 hours today. It's 10:15am

This, in short, is a prelude to a less than happy posting, wherein I try to make myself feel better about the shitness of the world by phrasing it in imperishable text and spreading my misery around on the web. And speaking of web...

I awoke (presumably from some sort of dream, but subsequent events rather scattered my recollections) in the darkness of night. I say darkness: the glow of the half a centimetre-across light on my wireless router, so dim in the minutes after the lamps are turned off, by 4am glows like the sickly green ghost-light of Minas Morgul, chucking ghoulish shadows around the room like dirty socks (some of them may be the ghoulish shadows of actual dirty socks). My head was buzzing, but not with any particularly issues, so 45 minutes later I was a little puzzled not to have dropped off back to sleep. I gave up trying to curl into a pre-sleep foetal position and stretched out on my back, easing tension in my back and shoulders.

Perhaps one of the reasons I can never sleep when I'm on my back is the simple fact of being able to see the ceiling. The ceiling is a terrifying canvass for an over-active imagination, even in a garret where the canvass metaphor is stretched out of shape by the angle of the roof, bringing parts of the ceiling within inches of a sleeping head. Tiny imperfections in the wallpaper (ceiling paper?) create a pebble-dash of tiny shadows, any one of which could turn out to be some tiny lurking terror, but - normally - don't.

This morning I found myself gazing at a piece of ceiling a foot above my face and spotting one of these nefarious dark spots. I squinted, expecting it to turn out to be some errant flake of paper or mysterious bit of fluff.

Instead, I was more than a little dispirited - it being 5am and myself in a state of nigh-hallucinatory sleep-deprivation - to discover a large spider sat inches from me, illuminated in the sickly green router glow, in a prime position to flop lazily onto my head.

Yes, dear reader, I am ashamed to say that I shrieked like a child and leapt out of bed. I can deal with my mild arachnophobia at 2pm on a sunny afternoon, when I will happily catch the spider in a cup and usher it outside. At 5am in the morning, thoroughly exhausted, my only post-screaming action was to grab a towel and flick the thing as far away from the bed as possible. I may well have overdone it, as I heard, distinctly, a little cracking sound as it bounced off the far wall. Of course, with a spider that size the sound was just as likely to be the plaster giving way as it was to be a fatal blow to the arthropod.

I feel slightly guilty about this. I'm a vegetarian. I'm kind to wasps. Why should I be so mean to a spider? But I console myself with this rationalisation: It was above my face! If Mahatma Gandhi was sitting there looking down at me from 8 inches away at 5am, I'd flick him off the wall with a towel.

My frenzied attack over, there was no hope of getting back to sleep, even if I'd dared turn the light out. Somewhere, in the garrety gloom, a spider with four legs in plaster is plotting a dastardly revenge.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Pleasure.

 

The film opens with a very old man addressing someone with a silly name that turns out to be his nephew. What the significance of the nephew is we do not learn. Perhaps he's in another film somewhere. Anyway. The old 'hobbit', Bilbo, has decided to use his time constructively in planning for an enormous party to which clearly many hobbits have been invited by... writing a 250 page memoir. Frodo, who doesn't know that the party is also for his birthday, decides to make up for this by going and sitting under a tree. Meanwhile a hoard of party-planners wearing invisible horse stockings borrowed from Rohan scurry about doing all the work.

Bilbo – who in The Lord of the Rings is described as looking the same at 111 as he did at 50 – is now so puffy and ancient that he is being played by Dame Judi Dench*, and he provides an illustration to show that the evil power of the ring has given him a different shaped nose (young Bilbo having refused a prosthesis on the grounds that it would be like 'putty scraped over too much head'). He tells us the story of EreborEreborEreborEreborEreborEreborErebor, a Dwarvish kingdom assailed by disembodied parts of a dragon. We meet the leader of the diaspora of exiled Dwarves, Thorin, who was so traumatised by the dragon's attack that he seeks refuge in Star Trek movies and walks around dressed as a Klingon.

A magic smoke ring carries us back 60 years to when Bilbo's nose was slightly more pixie-like. Gandalf appears and for no obvious reason invites Bilbo on an adventure. Film Bilbo is less worried about offending wizards and totally neglects to invite Gandalf to tea, but at least he has installed special windows that make the eyeballs of nosey people extra large and alarming. We are not treated to the view from the other side of the glass that makes Bilbo look like he has a tiny head and an enormous neck. Gandalf leaves chuckling at the vision.

Dwarves start appearing. Ever on the look out for commercial gain the Dwarves have sold all their hoods to the rangers on the Shire borders and all their tassels to a less than salubrious 'gentleman's' establishment in Bree. So it is that they have nothing to hang in Bilbo's hall other than weapons, and it's probably a good idea they put them down before they hurt anyone. The film Dwarves appear to be largely a parade of bearded, super-powered imbeciles, with those powers focused on an admittedly impressive ability to catch plates without looking at them. Thorin would nonetheless take them over an army 'because they turned up'. This logic is irrefutable, since presumably he is comparing them to an army that doesn't turn up, and despite at least one of the Dwarves being Frank Spencer they are theoretically more useful than an non-existent army, if only slightly.

With the Dwarves being a motley collection of slightly middle-class tradesmen with rubber faces, it's clear that Bilbo has been invited along to provide some much needed gravitas. Gandalf, on the other hand, has clearly chosen him because he is 'also a Took', which we know from other movies means “clownish moron”. Unfortunately, he can't pass the all-important Thorin “showing up” test because they're having the meeting in his front room and he's already there. This leads to Bilbo having to engineer as many showing up opportunities as possible in order to prove to Thorin he belongs, even though in order to keep Showing Up he does occasionally have to run away or over sleep.

Bilbo accidentally joins the quest after he spends the morning trying to fly Middle-Earth's most disappointing kite. Realising after 20 minutes of unimpressive fluttering that it is in fact his contract, he decides to sign it and Show Up. Thorin makes a small mental note, not for the last time.

The story then proceeds for a while along similar lines to the book. Film Gandalf and Film Thorin bicker about general Elf-racism, leading Gandalf to temporarily block Thorin on Facebook and storm off. The talking wallet is thankfully replaced by snot, and Bilbo is caught during a slightly pony rescue mission. The cockney trolls play rough and bag up the Dwarves, but Gandalf shows us his patented Mobile Sun ™ (later seen hovering behind the Rohirrim as they attack the armies of Mordor from the North) which he's been hiding in a rock (the casual viewer might think this is just letting the dawn sun shine through, but from the Trollshaws that would naturally still have been behind the nearby Misty Mountains at that point) and turns the trolls to stone.

Thorin then shows further hostility to Elves as he tries to refuse one of their swords, but this is because he thinks he's a Klingon and the Elves keep dressing as Vulcans to annoy him. Bilbo gets a sword seemingly made from the compressed bones of the trolls' victims.

Earlier on we were introduced to wizard Sylvester the McCoy. They insist on calling him a different name, but he's just being Sylvester McCoy so the character name isn't important. He saves his prickly hedgehog friend, but the presence of big spiders mercifully distract them from doing the congratulatory Disney song and dance number they were obviously planning.

McCoy eventually meets up with the company, where he pulls a few faces and hands over a portentous sword. Gandalf makes a logical leap and decides that the presence of large dogs shows that the company is being hunted. The viewers by now are aware that Thorin is indeed being pursued by the remnants of Guillermo Del Toro's involvement in the project. Del Toro's imagination repeatedly impinges on the film and tries to bugger up the story, but ultimately cannot stop the Dwarves reaching Rivendell, where we meet Smiley Elrond, Smirking Elrond's more cheerful brother. Smiley Elrond helps by taking the Dwarves to his special moon rumpus room, where he goes to enjoy a glass of moonshine and play moon-twister, watches Moon on DVD, moons the passing Elves on the cliffs below, and listens to Shepherd Moons by Enya, as well as reading the occasional moon-rune in June (in the back of a spoon), which he does now to reveal the secrets of the Lonely Mountain's secret door. Laying the map on his special moon air-hockey table, Elrond reveals that the Dwarves are in a desperate race against time. For some reason he is then moderately surprised when they leave the next day.

As the Dwarves prepare to sneak off, we are reintroduced to some old faces. Very much the oldest face on offer is Saruman's who enjoys a brief vertical establishing shot (just to prove he can still do it) before being allowed a nice sit down. Galadriel appears to spend most of the meeting of the White Council standing on a turntable that gently wraps the bottom of her dress around her legs. This makes her so giddy she then entertains herself passing telepathic notes across her desk to Gandalf, possibly inviting him round the back of the bike sheds for a snog.

If the Film White Council appear to be ineffectual, they are at least true to the spirit of the Book White Council, which takes 400 years to establish that the Necromancer is Sauron. Three films suddenly doesn't seem quite so unreasonable in comparison.

After the Dwarves survive a very literal Battle of Wounded Knee, Bilbo becomes aware that without going off anywhere, he cannot Show Up and impress Thorin. His cunning plan is thwarted by Goblins, who reveal a somewhat uncomfortable method of getting into their halls from the Front Porch (how they get back out again, this tale does not tell; possibly they have rocket packs). Fortunately, the whole Company has secretly been turned to rubber by Smiley Elrond's magic salad (justifying the otherwise mysterious focus on food while in Rivendell), allowing them to survive an increasingly unlikely series of falls onto solid rock from an assortment of precipitous heights. Bilbo, being in general about 3 inches shorter than his companions, is so small that the goblins mislay him, allowing him to bounce his way down a cliff face for the psychological fun and games of the famous “Riddles in the Floodlights” sequence.

“Down there in the floodlights lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don't know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum - as bright as brightness, except for two cute blue eyes in a thin face.”

Despite the editing out of this brief sequence...

“This time Gollum tried something a bit more difficult and unpleasant:

It can only be seen, cannot be felt

Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt

It lies on stars and in the sun

It shines on the pitch of a stadium

It dazzles frogs, moths it catches

Makes shadows, discomfits badgers.

Unfortunately for Gollum Bilbo had heard that sort of thing before; and the answer was all round him any way. “Light!” he said without even scratching his head or putting on his thinking sunglasses.”

...we enjoy the confrontation before Gollum realises he's been had. Bilbo, dazzled by the underground brightness, misses his footing and slips. The tiny pilots inside the ring guide it carefully onto his outstretched finger and he disappears.

Fortunately for Bilbo, Concorde has been decommissioned for Health & Safety reasons, and instead putting on the ring has the sound of a gerbil blowing in your ear and a vague sensation of having drunk too much absinthe. Bilbo takes pity on poor Gollum, and very sensitively kicks him in the face before escaping the mountains for ever.

The Dwarves, meanwhile, have fully exploited their rubbery status in a 10 minute chase sequence in which they fall approximately half a mile down a sheer cliff, culminating in Dame Edna landing on top of them, with few ill effects. The goblins, meanwhile, are left to review their approach to security when their cunning system of rickety bridges, rotten wooden ladders and rope swings are used against them so effectively. A review is set up, headed by a senior Civil Servant, and eventually concluding that in future the goblins should build a number of wide solid platforms made of teak, that goblin security guards should be issued with tiny parachutes and that any future interrogation of prisoners should take place on the ground unless they've already had their arms cut off.

Gandalf, realising that the rubberisation spell will soon wear off, hurries the Dwarves into the daylight. There the Dwarves stand in the beautiful reddish glow of a sun that has already sunk below the mountains, and provide Bilbo with his great chance: he can now Show Up! He is slightly disappointed by Thorin's less than fulsome reaction, but the Great Dwarf makes a mental note that Bilbo Showed Up, not for the last time.

Just when everything appears to be meandering towards the End of Part One, Del Toro's imagination bursts back into the film and the Orc with the Fork ™* chases them up a tree. Gandalf places an order with EagleCabs, but it's December, and frankly there are a lot of parties and to be perfectly honest there might be a bit of a wait.

While they wait, Thorin decides to single-handedly attack the Orc horde that all 15 of them had been flying from in mortal terror moments before. We don't see this, but Gandalf's burning pine cones act like the pills on Pac-Man, and just for a few seconds the Dwarves are invincible and allowed to eat the Orcs. Bilbo decides to Show Up again, but doesn't manage to eat any Orcs before the effect wears off and he and Thorin are in mortal danger.

EagleCabs arrive just in time and drop the company on a convenient eagle heliport. Thorin turns out not to be dead, appreciates Bilbo Showing Up and gives him a hug while crying, which is particularly understandable given moments before he was being bitten in half by a wolf.

The film ends with them staring at a mountain that is still 250 miles away, revealing that Middle Earth is actually flat! This information will no doubt become crucial in the next film when Gandalf summons Great A'tuin to eat Smaug.

The Purist

 

* with thanks to @perfectlyvague

Conclusion

I have come to a simple conclusion: I have Hobbits on the brain. Not the little furry fuzzballs themselves, cute and leaf-eared as they may be, but the film and its future fellows.

The primary reason for this, beyond my status as a general all round Tolkien geek, is the fact that I still can't see the damn thing. This post is not about my slowly receding Chicken Pox (you want 'agony' for that), but its lingering effect is that I'm still in isolation. Sitting, with my germs, in a cinema with lots of potential unPoxed people is to be frowned upon, even if some of my scabs look a little like popcorn.

 Instead, I can read reviews, watch clips, try to ignore my friends on Facebook (my only form of regular human contact) as they discuss details. I can read the damn thing (gasp!) but I can't see it. As a result I think it's taking on greater proportions of importance in my mind. Frankly, up until the reviews started coming in I wasn't all that bothered. I had obsessed over every tiny detail of the production of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the extent that by the time I watched it the film was so denuded of surprises that it left me cold. So I have intentionally ignored "An Unexpected Journey", so successfully that I was in danger of being rather ennuish about the whole thing - not like me at all, when it comes to M.E.

So when I find myself musing on a facebook status that someone's "three hours' sleep is catching them up", I end up with Tolkienish imagery entering my head, imagining three hours' sleep as a sort of Grey Rider, hooded and cloaked as if it does not want to be known, slowly gaining on the bad sleeper until it comes upon him, in some dark place, far from help. I shared this idea, much to the horror of the friend who felt that I had added a new terror to exhaustion. So I amended the image in my head from a Grey Rider to a Hot Pink Rider, on the basis that just because I'm starting to lose my marbles I don't need to scatter everyone else's.

Agony

Not having been ill that often, I'd always been particularly twitchy about the fact that I'd never had Chicken Pox. I picked up by osmosis that it was much worse to get it as an adult (not with the same specific horrors as mumps, but...) and the thought of all that itching for days on end, well... I just didn't like the sound of it at all.

I even asked my travel doctor if she thought it was worth getting the varicella vaccine. Sister Mary*, however, was having none of it. "You're almost 40 and have lived in London half your life!" she exclaimed. "There's no way you've never had the pox!"

(looking back, the idea that some people have this without realising it makes me wants to hit them with saucepans, but since they're presumably 5 years old I'll probably let them off)

No matter how many times I insisted that I hadn't, there was no convincing her. And since I wanted to be immune to it, in the end I stopped arguing. This is what people do when they are told something they want to hear.

And, like most things that are what you want to hear, it turned out to be total and utter bollocks.

I knew I'd been exposed (cricket club AGM, of all places - 36 year old fellow sufferer from the more isolated plains of New Zealand). I'd checked the immunity status of my fellow actors (all fine, though worrying about it gave me a reputation as a hypochondriac). The most likely time for me to come down the main illness was right in the middle of show-week, but I made it through to the cast party with nothing worse than fatigue and dizziness, and frankly - being a bit of a wuss -  I don't need to be ill for that to happen.

I didn't drink much at the party and got home just as England were knocking off the winning runs to go 2-1 up against India. Naturally, hangover or not, I expected to spend a lot of Sunday asleep. When I barely woke up at all, the tiny part of me that was conscious had a very bad feeling.

For those who don't know, from what I've read Chicken Pox in adults is nasty for three reasons. Firstly, the flu-like bit of it, where you feel like you've been run over by Boris Johnson's pants, is more severe than it is in children; more drawn out and more painful. This then can lead to complications, like pneumonia or the inflammation of practically every organ going, up to and including the testes (orchitis, the latter is called: I'll never look at Shagrat and Gorbag the same way again). Finally, the pox itself follows less predictable pattern than it apparently does with children, with the spots turning up anywhere on the skin and mucus membranes. And I mean anywhere. I'd rather be struck down by tiny vampires; at least they stay out of places where they're uninvited.

For all the massive whinge of this entry, I seem to have avoided complications of any kind, apart from a couple of infected spots that I'd idly scratched before I'd realised what was happening (one is under my eyebrow - this may be fun). But the whole experience was still truly horrible. What noone tells you (and I feel like I've read every webpage going on the illness, to the extent I was correcting NHS Direct at one point) is that it fucking hurts. It's agony. "Unbearable itchiness" doesn't begin to describe it. I felt like I was being devoured by giant ants or stung by wasps. A further rare complication is necrotising fasciitis , and there were times when it did indeed feel like a million organisms were munching on my skin. Fucking itchy? I think the medical profession is desperately trying to avoid scaring the bejeezus out of the 10% of adults who didn't have the Pox as a child. And the strongest painkiller they'll prescribe for this torment? Paracetamol.

Of course, the intensity of the pain does eventually go and is replaced by the legendary itchiness, though again 'itchy' summons up images of comedy itching powder in a cartoon character's underwear or people desperately rubbing at their hay-fevered eyes. This was just a wave of slightly smaller ants. Not scratching is never an problem - your body instinctively understands that to scratch this would just lead to bits of your own body coming off on your hands.

But you want the relief and sensation of scratching nonetheless. There are no creams, lotions or shampoos that can truly relieve this, and the sleep-depriving intensity of it drove me to drinking whisky and popping ibropufen at the same time. Fortunately, that stage lasted only 24 hours, and - several days in - I finally reached the 'annoying and uncomfortable' stage that - I suspect - is everyone else's default supposition of what having Chicken Pox is like.  

Now I look like Pinhead with aluminium alopecia and have learned that my tendency to buy only skin-tight clothing really does have its drawbacks, but I am essentially on the mend. And this is it, no matter how much of a ranty blog mood something like this puts you in, you do get through it in the end. It's only a week, after all. But poxless adults - do not take anyone's word for your immunity. If someone gives you a sniff of a chance to get the varicella vaccine, bite their hands off, before a thousand fiery ants start biting you. 

Spotty.

PS: If you think you've been exposed, apparently the vaccine still works after exposure and before symptoms, so don't sit back and wait for a week of evil. You do not want this.
 
* she isn't called Sister Mary.  But she really ought to be. 

Curtain

I'm on stage next week. There won't be a curtain, sadly - it's not that kind of theatre. It's a small studio above a very nice pub in Kentish Town, so what it lack in front of stage drapery it makes up for it easily accessed food and drink.

The lack of curtain has led the Director to get awfully excited about format flexibility, so we're doing the play "in the round", with at least some audience on every side. I'm looking forward to the occasional moments where I get confused and start talking to an audience member instead of one of the cast: it really, really, really could happen. 'Intimate' does not begin to describe it.

Hopefully people will not be freaked out by the lack of a veil between them and the actors. The play is a black comedy (or perhaps, for the pretentious amongst you, a "dark farce") about a bunch of self-obsessed, 30-something success-fetishists getting together for a NYE party in a country house in the middle of nowhere. Suffice it to say, it all goes a bit avocado-shaped, given there are hooded figures at the window, myriad lies to be uncovered and something very nasty and sharp lurking in the background. Oh, and Buckaroo. Possibly Twister, too, but that might still be vetoed on the grounds of taste.

Tickets are available here.

Produce

I have a love-hate relationship with avocados.

This is not to be confused with my love-hate relationship with armadillos, who keep hanging around the local bus shelters with their leathery armoured shells scaring the locals but helpfully decimating the troublesome London termite population. Or my love-hate relationship with advocaat which, despite being pleasingly sweet and custardy,  once ran off with a beloved girlfriend of mine and now regularly sends abusive postcards from an expensive holiday home in Mauritius.

No, avocados hold a special place in my heart and my spleen. I love them. I love their distinctive taste, their creamy texture and the fact that - loving them as I do - I then get told by health experts to eat even more of them. This is not something that happens with Irn Bru, and is therefore to be cherished, like a small dog who - although a bit embarassing because he tries to shag your Aunt Betty's leg when she comes to tea and keeps weeing on your CD player - also does your tax returns and forges convincing Jackson Pollocks.

Sadly, however, the Irn Bru analogy can prove useful. Would I like IB so much if when I reached for a bottle and upended it into my mouth, nothing happened? I would lower it, peer into the bottle and sigh. "This Irn Bru isn't ripe", I moan, popping it back into the sunlit window sill to speed the process.

The following day I come back and open the Irn Bru again. Still nothing. This despite the fact it has "ripe and ready" on a sticker across it. I put it back on the shelf.

The next day I'm incredibly busy and get home so late for work I go straight to bed and don't check the bottle.

The next day I reach for the Irn Bru and open it. I pour it into a glass, only to discover it's now gone grey and tastes of dishwater. It goes down the sink.

The avocado: produce that - from my experience - manages to be ripe and edible for about the length of a Peter Jackson movie. Miss this golden window of opportunity in either direction, and you're either crunching a bitter, zombie-green pebble, or a disintegrating, putrid bruise in fruit-form. I've thrown out so many avocados I don't know why I don't just throw them in the skip on the way back from the shops, or better still just beat them to a pulp with a hammer straight after using the self-checkout machine. It would save a lot of heartache.

Of course, trying that on the armadillos gets you nowhere and only annoys them. Hug a Shelly. It's the only way.

Modification

I was very relieved to hear that the Government's badger cull has been delayed for a bit, while highly paid officials decide whether or not it really is a fucking stupid idea. I was not alone in fearing that roving bands of psychopaths with a license to kill things with distinctive streaks of grey hair could lead to a bad end for people of my age.

Of course, unlike the poor old badger, hacking their TB'd lungs into a silk handkerchief as they write poems of loss and despair in their under-siege setts, I can very easily turn to a range of products to disguise myself and throw off the marauding gangs, though I should probably be more careful: a recent habit of going for reddish brown means I put myself at danger of being trampled by horses and eaten by beagles from an illegal hunt.

Dyeing one's hair is a delicate business. As modifications go it's relatively minor - compare painting Just for Men into your stubble to having buttock implants, and suddenly it doesn't seem quite so embarrassing - but I do worry about where it will lead. Assuming my hair doesn't all fall out one day (the genetic jury is out on that one) I don't want to run the risk of ending up like Paul McCartney, looking like my own waxwork replica that's been left to close the radiator overnight. Judging exactly when to stop covering your grey is like to be as complicated as working out when to stop wearing jeans or start becoming a fan of charismatic orchestra conductors.

But at the moment, while I'm relatively confident my skin's elasticity is not such that combining it with dark hair would cause me to look like a victim of a slow-working alien disintegration ray, there's no way I'm allowing grey to have its way. If my hair would just fade respectably, that would be one thing. Instead, my hair is performing some sort of crazy art experiment on my head, a follicular abstract project of uncertain ambition. It's latest triumph is a neat circle of grey just above my right ear, a colourless crop circle that bears no relation to any of the other grey hairs around it. I live in fear that I'll wake up and find that the greys have painted 666 on my hair with impressive neatness.

I might get lucky. Maybe the grand plan is for my hair to delicately outline the location of the unrecovered Brink's-MAT gold bullion. I'll be staring in the mirror with horror, aghast at the salt-and-pepper disaster on my head, when I'll suddenly realise that I'm gazing at a set of coordinates and a crudely drawn picture of Hayward's Heath. I'll race south with a shovel as the coordinates lead me to a Sussex wood, and just as I strike the unmistakable feel of metal buried the soil, I'll be shot and killed by the Government's badger hunters, like the end of Nostromo but with omnivorous mammals.

I think, on balance, I'll keep dyeing it for a while. It's just safer.  

Ladder

I've never worn tights. Well, I say that, when I was 5 my mum concocted what was possibly the most bizarre fancy dress outfit ever to create two "Jubilee Trumpeters", consisting of me and my brother wearing souvenir golden jubilee carrier bags and a pair of white tights (the trumpets were adapted cardboard tinfoil rolls). And I have a vague recollection of there being a pair of yellow tights in the dressing up box in my bedroom when I was little, which would almost certainly have been used to create some sort of superhero get-up at one point. But, APART FROM THAT, I have never worn tights.

They have always struck me as a curiously impractical garment. Any clothing item which breaks the very first time you wear it, and provokes more of a "oh well, that was bad luck" rather than a scream of "fucking bastards, I'm taking these back" might as well be replaced with tissue paper and roll of Sellotape. Or perhaps a form of pasta.

Life, however, throws plenty of tights substitutes at the unwary male. Or at least this unwary male (and there must be few more unwary than I). Most durable to date are my cycling leggings. Well, actually, they're not cycling leggings at all, they're cheap-as-chips running leggings from purveyors of bargain shite Sports Direct. But I wear them when cycling, and thus far they have proved impressively durable, despite my tendency to forget to unzip the ankle looseners when I take them off: I end up hopping around with stretchy leggings attached to my foot as I try to pull them off, like a pixie attached to a piece of chewing gum.

(It's amazing how bothered people can be about how others dress - read this thread as a prime example of hot-under-the-collar-fuckwittery)

Most fragile seems to be the ultimate in male tights-substitute, the skinny jean. Despite clearly being a young persons trouser (and therefore out of bounds to angora wearing oldies)  I can't resist building my entire wardrobe around the Skinny.  Perhaps it's a reaction to spending most of my twenties wearing baggy clothes to hide how skinny I (thought that I) was. Perhaps I secretly just want to wander around in tights for some reason*. Perhaps I'm having a mid-life crisis and can't afford a sports car, a jet-ski or a giant, ceramic replica of Jeremy Clarkson.

But Skinnies, it turns out, are a bit on the tissue-paper-and-pasta side. They don't ladder, as such, but I've never worn through any leg wear as quickly as a work through my tiny jeans. It might be that, despite being determinedly on the slim side, I'm just not quite the right shape for them. They are clearly not - for instance - designed for the frequent cyclist. Not only does wearing them while actually cycling lead to worn-through holes in very embarrassing places (stemming from friction of taut denim against saddle) but if you've got thighs and a bum you're going to have to be careful when bending. There's really not a lot of give. Bending at the knees might look after your back when heavy lifting; it doesn't do much for your trousers, and the subsequent journey home on the tube can be awkward.

Maybe I should look into tights after all. And maybe a carrier bag.

S.

*I'm thinking more from the actory side of things than being a transvestite, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Sake

It is indicative of just how drink obsessed I am at the moment that rather than reading this as 'purpose' or 'benefit' I thought instead of a Japanese rice-based alcohol. But then I got over that and remembered that I don't really drink rice based liquor and wouldn't have anything to say about it other than:
I'd like to go to Japan one day.

It's amazing what you can do with rice. I wonder if you can also build a helicopter out of it?

 Japan suffers in my travel plans because of its determinedly northern hemisphere persuasions. I'm sure it regularly cries with anguish about the missed opportunities of being north of the equator and missing out on visits by cricket-loving Brits. If you're going to have a summer at exactly the same time as my summer, frankly you're just not trying hard enough to get my attention. Who works out your scheduling?

 A friend has just said "this time next week it'll be 4:30". So it's going to be dark at the end of the working day instead of just relentlessly gloomy (and right now there's a strange whispy but vast layer of blackish cloud drifting damply underneath the usual smooth grey shell of the autumn sky, as if someone somewhere has set fire to a whale), and this is the point where my motivation to flee the country comes into sharp focus. But Japan? It's single saving grace for a winter holiday would be going to those hot pools that always feature in David Attenborough shows and watching red-faced monkeys kick the shit out of each other in pursuit of a good bath. So, for my own sake, I need some light, some sunshine and - should I not get them - some rice-based liquor and a slice of cake. I'll take what I can get.

Shakiness

Sometimes I don't get hungry. Of course, this happens to everyone, but that's normally because, for instance, they've just eaten a massive cake just before the girl jumps out and have eaten her as well (leading to an expensive public inquiry), or because someone once served them a cocktail with liquid nitrogen and now they don't have a stomach (for fuck's sake).

No, sometimes I don't get hungry even though I haven't eaten for ages. The first I know about the fact that actually I'm a couple of meals short of a picnic is when the end of my nose turns slightly numb and I come over a bit indistinct until I eat a samosa or something. It's the only time I ever consider eating a Mars Bar, a confection almost perfectly designed to be unappetising. Looking as it does like a small bit of fungally infected wood and tasting sweeter than the stench of a dead mouse under the floorboards, Mars' crowning glory is the way they've made the chocolate so sticky that I have to clean my teeth about five times before I stop spitting brown like a chewing-tobacco addicted cowboy. At least Coco-Pops only turn the milk brown.

Anyway, that's all rather beside the point. I have no idea why my stomach sometimes decides it can't be bothered to alert me to the fact that I should, in fact, have eaten a cheese sandwich several hours ago and am now on the verge of catatonia. It's a bit like having a car with a malfunctioning fuel light that works some of the time, so that not only do you not have any idea how much fuel you've got, you forget to keep track of it because on the last three occasions everything was working just fine.

It's potentially awkward, since I tend not to have much food in the house. This is because I have a slightly erratic lifestyle and there's no guarantee I'm going to be home at mealtimes, so if I buy perishables they tend to, well, perish. So I live hand to mouth - or rather, Morrison's to mouth - leaving the very real possibility of forgetting to eat and then having to crawl shakily on my hands and knees to the nearest corner shop so they can sell me an overpriced flapjack.

In fact surely you'd have to be on the verge of starvation to buy one of their flapjacks, and yet they seem to have quite an acceptable turnover* of them. Which makes me wonder if there are not hordes of shakiness-beset Londoners crawling into convenience stores across town forking out £2 for a life-giving square of stickiness. I may not be alone after all.

* or possibly an acceptable flapjack of turnovers

Fascist

Yesterday I may have upset a funny man.

It's entirely possible that he might actually be quite funny, though I confess I have not expended a great deal of effort finding out. I spotted a RT which went thusly:

“Given the physical restrictions of ET's species, in order to build spaceships etc, they must have mastered a slave race”

After a brief moment of appreciation of the iconoclastic audacity of the tweet, I paused and thought: hang on – the film goes to great lengths to show exactly how ET’s race overcomes their physical limitations (telekinesis, multi-purpose glowing digits, that sort of thing), which rather spoils the joke. I retweeted it again, adding “> bullshit” as a coda.

I’d intended to explain myself, but I got distracted. So my hard-line joke-analysis sat unexplained on Twitter, until the joke’s progenitor spotted it and replied:

“Cheers. Nice to know a joke is still appreciated.”

So now I feel really bad, as if I’ve been caught being some sort of geeky humour-fascist. Though now I’m wondering what a geeky humour-fascist would look like – perhaps a uniform, Jarvis Cocker specs and a nose that lights up? Not a red one, a real one, but with a small LED horribly inserted in their nasal canal. They are fascists after all.

A sense of humour is a precious thing. Its absence has imperilled the career of England’s Kevin Pietersen, and of course it’s widely accepted to be a prerequisite for every woman who’s ever pursued love through classified ads or internet dating*. Scientists have also discovered that you can produce electricity equivalent to a medieval waterwheel by plugging seven clowns into a Speak & Spell. Basically, a sense of humour is vital, but a bit like a hamstring: you never think about it until it starts to stiffen up. Except that’s not entirely true. For a start no-one has ever got punched in the face or persecuted by the Daily Mail because someone thought their hamstring was off-colour.  And secondly, I suspect people think about their sense of humour quite a lot, just probably not in a very realistic way.

As Marie says in When Harry Met Sally: ‘Everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humour but they couldn't possibly all have good taste.’ And presumably they can’t all have a sense of humour. How many British people would own up to not having a sense of humour? It would be akin to saying “Hi, I like kitten death”, or “I still love Jimmy Saville”. But why should it be so impossible to imagine someone proudly saying, “Hello, I’m Geoffrey. I’m extremely intelligent, work in Great Ormond Street saving the lives of cute children, I climbed Kilimanjaro last year for Marie Curie Cancer Care and I haven’t understood a single joke told to me since 1986”? 

Fair enough, I’d have gone off him for the appalling boasting long before we got to the sense of humour part.

 

So, am I losing my sense of humour? Do I have to worry about it in the same way I worry about losing my hair? Do people get less humorous? According to the University of Glasgow, this happens from about 52 years old. Some clever Americans think that grandparents just can’t spot a joke. I’m just waiting for the research that says all over 65s want to invite Jim Davidson round for tea to listen to his charming views on social equality while offering him some knitted cake. Losing your sense of humour looks like a real threat. Whether that’s worse than losing hair or, say, liver function is probably a moot point, but it certainly lends yet more terror to the ageing process – as if it needed it.

Then again, some of this research compares the reaction of old people to teenagers, suggesting yet again that there’s a correlation between having a sense of humour and laughing uncontrollably at BBC3 shit starring Will Mellor. I’m not particularly convinced of that. Maybe the grumpy old bastards just got discerning on your ass.

* Do men – in general - also seek GSOH? Or are they faintly terrified at the possibility that their date might be funnier than them? 

PS: For a more serious take on recent instances of Comedy Fascism, here's Rufus Hound