I made this with a friend roaming the streets of Camden looking for targets. In the end Orlando was perhaps palmed off more than 20 times, but here are the few that we did manage to capture.

Gee, I think You're Swell

When Eleanor leaves a stellarscopic hole will appear

and shine ablaze within my soul.


Those chancery occasions for opportune fun

will all be but lost to me.


And nothing big

And nothing small

Can begrudge me that this was a good thing.

train shoes

Hangover Jim

Yeah so I drink too much. I was not at all (neither do I ever knowingly) intending to drink that much. That much was excessive – and I blame it on the date concept, which gives me nerves. I should not have an overdraft on my card. I drink to loosen up you know. And in the same vain as any other drug, you take it to not feel yourself that much. To shut your own head up. Because my head does get in the way a lot, bloody often it clogs up my time with minor stresses and boring boring pointless points. I filled the bathtub up to the brim the other day with cold water by accident instead of hot, and I worried so much about the wasteage of water that I couldn’t pull the plug out of that bathtub for THREE WHOLE DAYS. That was how much my brain worried about the consequences of a minor action and even when I compare it to murder or bombings, my brain still convinces me it’s a big deal. And I like a drink but that’s beside the point. Why can’t I get to the point? OK. I don’t love you and I don’t think that I could ever love you. That’s my confession. But you know why I don’t think I could ever love you? Because my stupid voice in my head can come up with millions of reasons to persuade me not to, but when I’m actually in the reality of the situation, as in with you – I definitely could love you. So why does my “inside head voice” and my “outside world life” not match? That’s my question and I wondered if you could help me figure it out. It’s a work-in-progress show this, or a work-in-process because I’m trying to work something out which won’t become a show.

Here are some of my inside head reasons:

- I don’t like your coat. The collar annoys me. They’re flaps. So, when it’s done up you look like a Kremlin guard but when it’s not, it's just flapping and gapes. It shows too much of what you’re wearing underneath when it’s open and reminds me of 16^th century ruffs that men used to wear which are pretty much ridiculous, like those cones dogs wear round their heads when they get sick. And the large opening isn’t practical; coats are meant to keep the heat in, and then if and when you do do it up you’re not audible because the flaps cover your mouth, so what’s the point?

- You’re positivity about the world. About getting things done and the good advice about making To Do lists. I hate that you’re well put together and clean because I wish I was – this is plain menace coming from jealousy and a feeling of inadequacy.

- You’re a “clean shirt”. And that’s a term I’ve taken from you when you’ve used the unapologetically crass phrase ‘a person’s brand’. When you ask me ‘What’s their brand?’ I also bristle with anger, but that in and of itself doesn’t deserve to get a full bullet-point. You’re above hobos and bohemians and below suits. You wear smart casual and order flat whites, and don’t seem to find the ambient house beats being played inside the café like Christmas jingles at supermarkets through the month of December off-putting. You're plain chipper doing what you do with no sense of irony, anxiety or delusion. How do you manage that? Are you really happy or ignorant? What is going on?

- The use and idea of the term lad. I hate lad culture. I wrote to you in an e-mail I’d be waiting for you at the date space probably with a book and a beer, and then you wrote in the reply: ‘book and a beer, educated lad’. You summed it up, that’s what I hate. Lad culture is based around being able to drink lots and not keeping it down, and you all have this ingrained radar for BANTER but what banter really means is an affectionate term for lame in-jokes about that thing that happened to Dave when you all went on that trip where everyone was wasted 24/7. Wow I cannot take those people seriously and I know you have that lad-dness in you. You saying LOL in a conversation and a referring to a person’s brand, it’s all there. And I don’t reproach you for it I am merely stating I could never love a lad.

What can be said, what can’t be said. When I first meet a person I think of all the things that can’t be said out loud first, for example if you meet a fat person you check in with yourself immediately to note I cannot talk about this person being fat. In fact all of my opinions seem to stem from this can't be said field and therefore I am a nasty person. They fall out of my mouth when I am least suspecting it and when I don’t want them to because what can be said and what can’t be said are reconciled together with the lubricant of drink; or heightened situations; or most noble out of the lot, when you’re trying to do the right thing. In my books I have long held the belief that doing the right thing is being honest, then you can be free. But the price of that freedom? Losing the patience of more kind sensitive souls, sounding like a dickhead the majority of the time someone asks you your opinion, being kicked in the teeth by someone who takes offence, and a lack of regard for repercussions. No regrets.

Just Another Gameshow

The feeling that I used to get when I woke up was one of dread. I remember convincing myself that I had things to do that day. There were tasks/chores/duties I had to get through and accomplishing them regardless of whether I wanted to or not was what gave me the confidence to get out of bed. The days where I had a television record to work on that night, where my job consisted of herding up the audience, corralling them to sit in one of the hundred plastic chairs to watch just another gameshow, yes those were the good days. Good not because it had anything to do with enjoyment (it didn’t) but because I could see the point. One hundred drooling audience - no, that’s not fair not all were drooling some only plain keen - would file up and bicker on the cold grey pavements, often wet from the unending drizzle of the Tuesday. I would walk down the long line, talking at and looking each person in the eye, I’d peel off a sticker from a soggy wad of paper sandwiched in the clipboard and say, ‘Enjoy the show’. 

I had one of those stupid lanyards round my neck with the colourful show logo on and it felt like I’d been given a shit medal. But at least I could see the point. The people wanted to see their comedian perform on a big glitzy stage with lots of cameras hanging off the tracking on the studio ceilings, and when the applause roared as the opening credits theme tune played over the speakers and the star walked on, I could see the point. This stuff I was doing was making a TV show and the audience I was leading to their pens, sorry, seats really liked this TV show. Personally, if I had a television I’d watch Frozen Planet but maybe that sort of attitude is what led me to imagine the audience as baying birds, as penguins flapping their short stubby wings against their bodies to make claps.

When the show was over, during which I’d be twiddling my fingers through the lanyard and scanning through the work-phone in the green room munching crisps, I’d say ‘good show!’ to any of the production team if I were to pass them on my way out, and sometimes to the act if he was walking down the corridor to jump straight in to his dressing room for a post-show debrief. A committed act. I’d walk on through the grossly lit corridor, through the streams of audience scurrying to the toilets or worrying about their last trains, I would carry on palming this stuff off and gladly reach the glass front entrance, where there would be kids waiting outside hoping for the chance to get an autograph. I’d scour the dark streets for the company taxi and look up at the stars and I would then maybe consider, ‘today was a good work day’.

Start From Anger

God I am such a precious cunt. Nothing gets my goat as much as listening to someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about but then everyone has to start somewhere. What I’m afraid of is a threat to my ego, and this usually comes about when someone who says they have no authority on a subject starts talking about the thing they’ve just admitted they know nothing about. It’s called an open discussion and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s the way new ideas are born. What is my problem? I like to listen dumbly to someone spouting nonsense and then internalise it as a quiet anger then verbalise it as something crass like, ‘I think I know what you mean’ or ‘I hear where you’re coming from’. But I don’t follow that statement up with ‘… however I think you’re wrong because of this and this and that’, probably because I don’t have the self-belief in what I have to say either. So I am stuck between a rock and a hard place just mulling things internally that never get let out and then the person probably thinks I agree with them. Fuck them.

Take the example of a teacher telling the stand-up that a great place to start is from ANGER. Think of something that makes you angry and then go from there, because that will probably make the tale a funny one. So if I were to apply that to myself I would go from the “morning commute”. The morning commute I had to do day in and day out made me angry. So instantly we are set on a tube or train. Ok so that’s relevant and observational, good start. Why did it make me angry? Because my brain couldn’t fathom a good enough reason for why we had to suffer the commute, nor could it comprehend why everyone also blindly followed the routine of getting on a packed train just as I started to wake up. The first conscious sensation I had to have every day of the week was ‘sod this’. Why would you inflict that on yourself? We could start a little later, or stagger the commute time to ease overcrowding, rather than queue up for rammed train after train to get to a destination no one was particularly keen to get to. Did it feel good to get in on time? Nowhere near good enough to erase from the memory the hell of the commute. So, I guess that stuff made me angry. It’s not that funny, not in my eyes. Perhaps I’m not going far enough with it. Or maybe, I didn’t find the actual situation that anger-inducing. Or, it could be that the advice of the teacher to start from anger isn’t a great one unless you’re good a venting anger in a funny or ridiculous way.

I’m prone to finding the ridiculous funny. But these things jump out at you rather than stem from within, and maybe that’s why it’s harder to draw from. We were walking up the hill that leads from my front door to the train station and I heard this crackling sound - lots of crackling sounds actually that were like nothing familiar. ‘What’s that noise?’ and when we stood there stationary and listened to it for a while I pointed up at the tree and said ‘oh my god.’ There were a hundred green parakeets all in one place pecking at the fruit (?) of a tree and their hundred stupid beaks were making the noise. Green parakeets in London. All in one tree. And it’s fucking freezing out here and the lime green made them look like giant caterpillars and there was an inexplicable expression across our faces as we watched these little monsters eat their way through our deciduous foliage. If they’d flown over from somewhere warmer like France or the Caribbean why hadn’t they flapped back? It makes me anxious that birds that have evolved to be this bright in colour (and so should feel innately out of place in dreary England) would continue to stay here longer than the time required for a bird to realise they’d made a mistake. An error of judgement. ‘Oh, you know we have these internal magnetic compasses built in to our brain’, ‘Yeah the one we rely on to make the right migration path across huge distances - what about them?’ ‘Mine isn’t working.’ ‘Neither is mine’ ‘Not a thing’. ‘So where are we?’ ‘Not sure, who cares let’s find a tree to eat.’ And then I’d shout up at the tree and say something unhelpful like, ‘But it’s bloody freezing! Aren’t you cold?’ and they’d all nod violently and carry on pecking. I’d say one last warning like ‘You’ll die if you stay here too long’ and then one of the peckers will speak up and say, ‘So will everyone’.

My funny comes from paranoia or fear or anxiety, but hardly ever anger. The trite stuff comes from anger. The comedians who raise their voices and say ‘fuck’ a lot in their material to hone in a point - no darling that’s just a lazy way to keep our attention.

I say this yet the best piece of stand-up I’ve seen is based around anger, though one rooted in human injustice and it was hi-lar-ious. Totally funny. It was about slavery. 

A cup of coffee always tastes better when someone you like makes it for you.

(wise words from a coffee cup, 2013)