Monthly Archives: August 2018

Man vs Beasties

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Forget any of the erudite arguments put forward against the existence of God by Dawkins or Hitchens. You want to disprove God? Just take one long look at the ocean floor, and behold some of the horrendous and upsetting abominations down there: things with see-through condom heads and eight-hundred legs that drag themselves over the pitch-black seabed like luminous tumours; swarms of sentient, electrified cucumbers with neon afros; things that look like eyes perched on dismembered heels.

Allow me to crystalise my thoughts through the medium of song: and a one, and a two… and a one, two, three, four… “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small…”

Really? Really God? You made them all? All of them? Those things? Why, God? Why? Were you drunk, God? Did you have a mental breakdown? Because if these creatures are so crucial to your Jesus-centric, global master-plan, then why did you hide them underneath 20,000 feet of wet, crushing blackness?

Anyway, I’m not too concerned about the nightmares that dwell within the ocean. I’m not an anemone. I don’t live in the ocean. When I visit the general vicinity of the sea area, I trust that people are going to skim or fly me over it as quickly as possible, and take great care not to dunk or somehow explode me into it. What I’m more concerned about is the land, and specifically my little portion of it. I’m talking insects and beasties, people. Hellish, hideous beasties.

insect2Summer is upon us, which means that even as I write this hordes of insects are amassing at the peripheries of our suburban castles, just waiting for the right moment to breach the defences and invade. Spiders, flies, wasps, ants, beetles: the whole bug-ugly battalion of multi-legged motherfuckers; hideous creatures that look like they were brought into existence by the collective imaginations of Clive Barker and HR Geiger after a night of particularly heavy drinking.

Beasties disgust and agitate me in ways that no other creature on earth can manage, with the possible exception of Katy Hopkins. I hate them. I hate them because they’re travesties, abominations, and harbingers of filth and disease. I hate them because they make a mockery of my mission to protect my home and my family from foreign invaders. I hate them because my primal programming compels me to avoid or destroy them. I hate them because they remind me of my own pointless and arbitrary existence on this planet. I’m a mere sack of meat, a host, a vessel, vulnerable, venal and killable: I and my kind are trapped in the ageless, endless cycle of shagging, spawning, shitting, eating and dying, a game every one of us on this planet plays, no matter how many legs we do or don’t have.

And all of this ephemeral, swirling mess of existential misery comes into sharp focus whenever I see a spider stringing and spitting its arse-glue around the lamp-shades in my living room. I think I think too much. I think I need to get out more (but in a fully-sealed bio-suit, of course).

I wish I was a spider sometimes, if only so I wouldn’t have to worry about spiders all the time.

(Note to God: if you do happen to exist, and the Buddhists happened to be right about reincarnation, then please don’t be an asshole and read the previous sentence as a direct and literal appeal for you to reincarnate me as a spider, so I could be squished by my own great-great-grandson or something. FYI, I want to come back as myself again, only thinner and richer)

insect3Summer’s influx of beasties transforms me into Howard Hughes. I’ll gladly sit in the house suffocating myself half-to-death in the baking, dog-killing heat – the windows and doors clamped shut, gaffer tape stretched over every gap and crack – if my sacrifice can prevent the entry of even one housefly.

YOU… SHALL NOT PASS!

As a child, I couldn’t eat my breakfast in the kitchen, or enjoy a simple shit in the bathroom, until every fly in the room had been snuffed out. I’d waddle around the bathroom snapping at flies with a hand-towel, always on the cusp of crapping myself, but unable to sit, squat or shit until every last one was vanquished, turtle’s-head or no turtle’s-head. The thought of those verminous swines lowering themselves onto my exposed buttocks mid-shit like some team of anal astronauts (Buzz Aldrin indeed) was too much for my sanity to bear.

My fly fury wasn’t confined to the bathroom and kitchen. I had venetian blinds in my bedroom, which came in handy for my part-time career as a fly serial-killer. Each slat was perpetually splattered with the blood and pus of a multitude of dead flies. I’d stun them, perch their break-dancing bodies on a slat, and then pull the cord to concertina them to death. My mum had to keep taking the blinds outside to scrub them down, doubtless wondering if her son was warming up to start taking down prostitutes.

insect4In our household this year, summer began with a war against ant-kind. Now, ants are great if they happen to be animated and voiced by Woody Allen. They’re not so great if they’re festooning your tiles and doing the conga across your counter-tops.

Their invasion was slow, insidious. Cunning! I’d find a new battalion of them peppered over the tiles next to the kitchen window each and every morning. I’d snuff them out, squishing their little bodies like bubble-wrap beneath my fingers. They’d return, they’d die, they’d return, they’d die. Then, nothing. No ants. Not a single one. Days would pass. A week, maybe. I’d cautiously declare the republic of our kitchen to be an ant-free zone, and rejoice in my victory over those mangy, mandibled monstrosities.

Alas, the first ants proved to be nothing more than the scouts for a full-out invasion force. The ants returned, they always returned, but each time in greater number, swelling their ranks until my fingers were black with the blood of a hundred of their tiny soldiers. They made my bin-cupboard into a fortress. One day I opened the metal sugar tin – sealed so tightly that nary a microbe could squeeze between lid and box – to find them swimming through the sweet white sugar like kids larking in a summer lake. Naturally, I killed them all. Over endless weeks I watched them slip and scurry beneath and between tiles and cupboards like something out of the X-Files. I watched as they sent forth their scouts and raised an anty flag above our fridge. I raged, I ranted, I splatted and thumped. Killed, cleaned, shifted and scrubbed. I genuinely debated slicing off their tiny heads and spearing them on Blu-Tac-mounted toothpicks as a warning to the survivors. Nothing worked. Nothing could stop them. With a small, reasonably mobile child in the house, I was reluctant to opt for the nuclear option: chemical sprays and bait traps.

I discussed the problem with a lady at work. She appeared to have the answer. “I will tell you something that is guaranteed to work,” she said with confidence.

“Yes?” I said, leaning in.

“Something that will send those ants packing, never to return.”

“Yes??!”

“It’s simple, costless and effective, and it has always worked for me.”

“Yes????!!!!”

“You must ask them to leave.”

I asked myself to leave my workmate’s vicinity. I obeyed myself. I then went to B&Q and bought chemical bait traps. Fuck Dr Doolittling the situation. Genocide wins, baby.

waspsFlies and ants may be bad, but wasps are the worst. They’re psychotic. I had one in my living room once that buzzed and dive-bombed at me with the ferocity of an airborne tiger. I attempted to swat it with a phone book, which I assumed would at least subdue the unruly fucker. It didn’t. The wasp came at me madder, faster and harder than before. I retreated from the room and slammed the door behind me. I may even have whimpered. One thing was clear: I needed to regroup and formulate a strategy. But first I had to ask myself: how the hell do I regroup when there’s only one of me?

You’ve got to at least admire the wasp. Each one is like a little Viking ever-ready to join Valhalla. Imagine you were shrunk down to the size of a wasp. Could you imagine yourself hovering a hundred feet in the air with a jet-pack strapped to your back as a giant tried to swipe you with a block of flats? What would you do? I think it most likely you’d whoosh off into the sky trying to stave off a heart-attack as every ounce of shit in your body exploded down your legs. What you probably wouldn’t do is whip a fork out from your pocket and zoom towards the giant shouting, ‘LET’S HAVE IT, YOU BIG FUCKING NONCE!’

Credit where credit’s due. Wasps: you’re an admirable breed of mental.

Thankfully, insects have been less visible and less of a problem over the last few years – wasps especially – owing to our cold summers and even colder winters. This is why, despite how much I may whinge about the scattershot nature of the Scottish weather, I wouldn’t change its dire character for the world. Australia, South Africa, FL USA, everywhere else in the world where it’s hot and humid: enjoy your beautiful sunshine.

But also enjoy your endless hordes of slimy, creepy, crawly, stingy, bitey little bugs and beasts. I’ll be here watching the rain drum against my windows, snapping the occasional fly and snubbing the odd ant, happy that at least my unwelcome visitors don’t have fangs or venom.

Yet.

UPDATE: This article you’re now reading – and that I’ve just combed through editing and tidying up – is now 3-years-old, written during the reasonably crap (and therefore reasonably typical) summer of 2015. Summer 2018 has been one of the warmest in recent memory, which means there will probably be grounds to write a whole new beastie-related article next year – a very terrifying one. Here’s hoping for a minus-20 winter!   

My Hell on the Fringes of the Edinburgh Fringe

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I put on a free show as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2011, and I think there’s a chance I might go to hell for it.

We’ll get to that later.

I can’t say I used to be a stand-up, because it isn’t true. It’s more accurate to say that stand-up used to be my hobby, like stamp-collecting, building rubber-band-balls, or making sculptures of your neighbours’ faces from mashed potato as they sleep. The rule is you don’t get to call stand-up ‘work’ or class it as a job until you’ve progressed to regular paid work, or are doing it for a living – which is fair enough. If you slice someone’s stomach open without the proper training, you’re not a surgeon: you’re a killer.

There are no qualifications in stand-up. It’s all vocational. You have to travel up and down the country, initially (and perhaps eternally) at your own expense, performing to as many different crowds in as many different cities and venues as possible, building and honing and polishing your set, until you either get good or give up. I gave up. I never found my voice or achieved any lasting consistency across my sets. Some of my performances were good, a handful were really good, some were lucky, some were middling, some were awkward, and many of them were absolutely train-wreck fucking awful. I guess I could’ve gone somewhere, maybe, perhaps – eventually – but I lacked the guts, gumption, focus, dedication and, later when I started a family, time to level-up.

I can attest that there’s nothing like being plugged into the stand-up circuit and working with some of the most naturally funny, insanely talented people in the country to help bring into sharp focus just how unfunny and untalented you actually are. I would consider myself a funny person, but only under 4 very strict conditions: a) when I’ve written things down for people to read, b) when I’m drunk, c) when I’m bored or angry, or d) if I’ve known you for a long time, and feel incredibly comfortable in your presence. Option d) is rather a big barrier to getting good at stand-up. With all the best will in the world, you can’t stay on stage for 6 months as the audience slowly grows fond of you. Ditto backstage at gigs: if you exempt yourself from the bare-knuckle banter and withdraw into yourself long enough to let nerves or silence dictate your place in the room and the wider industry, then you’ll always be a wall-flower.

Anyway, ignorance, naivety and alcohol conspired to convince me that I was ready to attempt 40 to 50 minutes of stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe very early in my ‘career’. My show was called God vs Jamie Andrew, and it required me to dress like a priest and rant blasphemously. I enjoyed it greatly, even if my audiences couldn’t always say the same.

Thankfully, I’d managed to secure an obscure venue with an odd-shaped room at an obscure time of the day, far from the madding crowd, so there weren’t many witnesses to my early stutter-steps (or fall-down-the-stairs-steps). Again, a few of the performances went alright – some of them even teetering on good – but even the ‘good’ ones were rough, raw and unready, and any success was as temporary as it was lucky. Sometimes I played to near silence, and not all of that could be attributed to the fact that the venue was a hostel, and the audience on any given day might have consisted entirely of bewildered Japanese people with a poor grasp of English. Sometimes I was shit. Sometimes I didn’t care. One time I actually dragged a stool on to the stage, and with shaking hand sat humbled and dejected in front of the audience calmly explaining to them that I was so disgustingly hungover that the hour ahead would be a penance for all of us. It was. Fair play to them, though, because they stayed, and even placed some coins in the bucket, I’m sure more out of sympathy than gratitude.

One day, after a particularly enjoyable performance, I decided to kill a few hours before getting the train back home seeing some other free shows. I was full of joy and vitality as I strolled along Edinburgh’s thoroughfares and up and down its nightmarishly steep staircases, and by ‘full of joy and vitality’ I mean I was drunk. Good drunk, though. Happy drunk. I was walking along with a beatific smile slapped across my lips, regarding the world with a goofy, half-cocked optimism, unable to drive or even properly walk but somehow convinced that I had the power to change the world.

Outside the train station I saw a homeless girl sitting on the street. She was a crestfallen soul in her mid-twenties who looked like the girl-next-door who by six-degrees of unlucky separation had become the girl-next-doorway. Christ-like thoughts danced through my head. I wanted to help her. Who knows if I was motivated by actual goodness, drunken sentimentality or some misplaced sense of self-importance, but it didn’t really matter. I couldn’t help her. The only thing of direct value in my pocket was a train ticket, and I didn’t think she’d appreciate that. She’d still be homeless, but just… somewhere else. “Hey, I’ve really enjoyed your debut Fringe show, ‘Sad Street Girl’. Why don’t you use this ticket to take this motherfucker on tour?”

I gave her the only other thing I had: a flyer for my show. Way to kick a girl when she’s down, right?

I invited her to the venue I’d be performing at the next day, and told her I’d put money behind the bar so she could come in an hour or so before the show started to have something to eat. All she had to do was say my name at the bar, and the staff would sort her out.

I walked away feeling pretty good about myself. I was a living saint; a half-jaked Jesus. They would compose songs about me. Build statues in my honour.

The next day, the homeless girl arrived at the venue, and duly spent the fiver I’d put behind the bar on booze. Who was I to judge? Booze had united us, so maybe it was the key to the success of our fledgling relationship. I drank to that.

When I told her I was going out to flyer to drum up an audience for that day’s show, without a second’s thought or negotiation she grabbed a stack of flyers and raced out into the street ahead of me. She fearlessly and tirelessly approached (and in some cases stalked and hunted) hundreds of passers-by, and delivered a pitch that was so friendly, enthusiastic, and charming that she pulled in the biggest and best audience of my festival to that point. The show went well, and the crowd was engaging and appreciative. They were also incredibly generous at the end of the performance (‘incredibly generous’ at my level of renown and expertise meant that there was enough money in the hat to cover my train ticket home, get me drunk and still have a little left-over for some description of post-drinking, artery-hardening fast-food). I rewarded my new Head of PR and ticket sales with another couple of pints. I was feeling good about myself: riding high on the buzz of a good show, and surfing on a wave of well-being for my part in helping a person less fortunate than myself. What a good soul I was.

Another half-hour or so later, my new friend had to leave, so I walked her to the door and thanked her profusely. She thanked me back. I said she could flyer for me any day and I’d make sure she was paid for it. We said our half-drunken, smiling goodbyes and both went in for a hug, but as our bodies drew close we looked into each other’s eyes and there was an awkward moment where it looked as if we might… just might… were we about to?…we were leaning in… were we about to… kiss?

We didn’t, but we had a long – perhaps too long – hug, and then off she went.

I stood in the street and lit a cigarette, trying to process what had just happened. My brain became the cop at the end of The Usual Suspects, suddenly slotting the horrible truth of the last few hours into place. I told myself I’d done good deeds, been a good man, but what had I actually done?

I’d lured a homeless lady who clearly had a drinking problem into a pub, plied her with alcohol, allowed her to work for me for less than the minimum wage, paid her in alcohol instead of cash, and then almost kissed her whilst drunk and dressed as a priest.

Nice one, Kaiser Soze.

What are you going to do at tomorrow’s show? Euthanise an old lady live on stage? Exploit some sex workers?

Actually, that’s a great idea for a show…

See you next year, Edinburgh!

THE END

PS: Please get out there and see live comedy, because many of the funniest, most-accomplished, most exciting and novel stand-ups in the country – and indeed the world – aren’t on TV, but out there tirelessly working in comedy clubs, theatres and the back-rooms of pubs up and down the country night after night, week after week. Get up off your arse and give yourself a treat.