I am a doughnut. Part 1.

I am a doughnut. Part 1.

A long time ago Eddie Izzard was a comedian and as such made a living by being funny. Over the years his sublime invention and surreal charms had me thinking he was just about the funniest man on the planet (given Peter Cook was already dead by then, the awkward sod). But then he went a bit funny. And not in a ha-ha way. A couple of years ago I booked tickets for me and ‘the wife’ to see him return to the stage after a few peculiar miss-directions in which he tried and succeeded enormously in becoming a bad actor, an unconvincing political figure and someone who liked running a lot. Finally, I gasped, a chance to actually see him live and wallow decadently in the sturm und drang of his comedy genius. If you’re not very good at sensing how things like this go and you were assuming this was leading into a glowing review then it might be best to skip a few lines. He was shit. Not just shit like going to a comedy show to realise the first 20 minutes compromise their ‘Live at the Apollo’ act and the rest is just unfunny and life wasting, but shit as in just pure shit.

I got quite excited early on when I thought I was about to laugh but then it didn’t happen because I must have tricked myself into thinking I could laugh at something that wasn’t funny. The rest was much more awful, like watching a drunk meandering down a street but knowing that whatever direction they took it would invariably end with him (or her) shitting in their trousers. I say the rest but I actually mean the rest of the first half. At this point I went for a cigarette and when I returned it took ‘the wife’ and I about 12 seconds to agree that nothing so unfunny for that much money was worth sitting through and so promptly left little Eddie to it. It made no sense because the rest of the charmless Wembley Arena crowd (venue and audience) seemed to love it, choking with laughter over trays of plastic chips and buckets of piss-water lager. But not us. Maybe we weren’t in the mood, or we’d just missed the point, or maybe we’re just a pair of snobby little buggers who don’t know a good thing when they see it. Or………..maybe we were right and that night, for this is all we can fairly judge it on, that first half performance of that gig was just the biggest pile of hippo shit masquerading for comedy in any format we’d ever seen. I even wrote a snotty review for some ticket website perhaps hoping Mr Izzard would read it and feel guilty and refund my tickets. And guess what happened! Fuck all.

Anyway, ‘the wife’ and I have just returned from Berlin, as in just this lunchtime, after one of those weekend city breaks. I’m still not totally sold on the European city breaks concept because with all the cramming in of spectacular sights and being pillow smothered by oodles of culture it becomes a bit of a Benny Hill style rush around, bookended by two slices of the finest stress inducing ball busters that money can, and indeed does, buy – flying. From an airport. To another airport. Don’t worry I’m not going to bang on about the limitless ‘chainsaw up the arse’ experience that airports offer, I got that off my chest a while ago and maybe I’ll stick it on this very site one of these days. Oh please do, we can’t wait etc. This time the airports were fairly ok though this morning there was a gormless couple and their lovely little, fun loving, cute, screeching, wailing bloody kid that at one point almost had their skulls melted by the molten laser beams firing from my eyes. If you’ve seen Superman 3 you’ll understand how that might work. So Berlin was great, overall. I’ve never been to Germany so didn’t really know what to expect, though I have read a lot about Germany but that just gave me preconceptions, meaning that I didn’t really know what to expect. It kicked off with an almighty, huge, great big married couple fall out the night before. Only the other day I had marvelled at how tranquil things had been between ‘the wife’ and I and of course that just put a big fat curse on it all. It really isn’t worth going into this in detail but I believe that the following factors may have contributed:

1. Tiredness (both of us)
2. Stress (both of us)
3. Wine (both, but mainly me (big surprise)
4. Impatience (me)
5. OCD (me)
6. Failure to pack until the very last minute, the very last minute being 10.58pm Friday night before a 2.30am start the next morning (take a wild guess)
7. Being a big fat miserable stubborn pig (me)
8. Being a tiny, slightly dramatic, equally stubborn, lovely delicate little piglet (‘the wife’).

Ps, don’t worry readers, I have sprinkled the last bit with invisibility dust so ‘the wife’ will never see it.

Incident alert!! Just a moment ago my sodding, fucking, stupid laptop decided it needed to restart for no apparent reason (though it did say it would check for me, how kind) and promptly switched off without saving the next 300 words. I am grateful for the 😦 face the programmers were able to offer as the lights went out. If you are the specific programmer who came up with the L face idea for the company that made this laptop, then well done. But also know that I will never stop hunting for you and that I hold you personally responsible for this. Not necessarily for the technical fault but for thinking that a patronising, shitty, worthless 😦 face would in any way compensate. I can picture you now as you skateboard to work with your retro satchel and big, ironic glasses, carrying a gallon of low fat latte and spend your day in a really cool, spinning chair talking to other twats about utter shit no-one would ever talk about if they didn’t rely on your crap ideas to make their unreliable IT products work. The ones they paid through the urethra for. I’ll also be thinking of you when I watch the news to hear that the police are without a clue as to why someone would strap 4kg of high explosives underneath a skateboard, sending a harmless tech wiz with his life ahead of him flying through the air, rapidly separating into 1043 pieces, 976 of which are believed to be fragments of his arsehole. Try restarting again motherfucker. Just try. Only kidding. 🙂 Best click the save button now though.

Moving back to where I was before some dipshit at a computer company was born, ‘the wife’ and I managed to sort things out after some biting, sarcastic, tearful remarks and whirling Tasmanian Devil impressions, which gave us a full 17 minutes of fitful rest before we skipped into Luton airport like star crossed young lovers. Suffering from heroin withdrawal. In a Turkish prison. This being us we arrived in Berlin all fine and dandy though it did take several days to get to our hotel because Berlin had decided, to honour our visit, to totally bugger up its central transport infrastructure. I should add that things weren’t helped by the fact that we made our usual mistake of believing everything we read in every bloody awful guide book by the oh-so well-travelled smugsters at Lonely Guide or Rough Planet. Things looked up once I bought a lighter and we dumped our bags, only to look down again when it took us the average lifespan of a Galapogos Tortoise to travel on the underground roughly the same distance from my back door to the bit right after my back door (dwelling variety, not anatomical, of course).

Halt, I’m spoiling you I think. I’m off for a cigarette and will write the rest of this balderdash later. All I can do to fill the time is to let you to work out the title. If you like Eddie Izzard or you’ve been to Berlin or know any German this will take you 1.5 seconds. If you haven’t it will take you forever. Or 2.27 seconds. Cheerio J

26. B. Hewitt 26.10.2015

Incidentally, and linked to the title of this very website, it took me 9 times to spell doughnut correctly. And by 9 times I mean 8 times and then looking on spellcheck. Very stupid indeed.

Proof read and checked by me. All errors forgivable. Aren’t they?