Off to Bestival

Oh god its early. Horribly early. Not for you. Or maybe you, but for me, getting up before double digits is not nice. Especially after a late night getting home from Brighton at 2am. I've woken in a sleepy stupor from my lovely comfortable bed and visited a clean bathroom for the last time till Sunday night. From now on, until then, it'll be snoozing in a tent and visiting crappers that smell of other people's crap. Yes a lot of people enjoy festivals. I however, am the not the greatest advocator for spending three days away when I could be at home in bed. I don't mean to sound overly miserable, but I am. At this moment in time I'd be very happy if someone said I didn't have to go. I would instantly climb back into bed, wake up at leisure and spend the whole day looking forward to Derren Brown revealing the secrets to his witchcraft tonight. Instead I've got to trek all the way to the Isle of Wight where no one actually lives or does anything. People say they do, but its so far away I think they're just lying. No one would really live there. There are only two roads. Why would you live somewhere with only two roads? It is a silly place. I can't just drive there either, I have to get a shitty ferry that will be full of shitty people and bad food and then when it finally docks I have to race to the Bestival site, pitch my tent and be onstage by 3.30 where I won't leave the stage for bloody hours and hours. I'm hoping it doesn't rain or that will make things all truly horrendous, with people sinking and dying in mud, young children sliding off into the distance never to be seen again, and everywhere looking like a giant turd.


I am being miserable. It'll probably be a bit fun. Just a bit though. At some point I'll wake up and I'll feel a lot better about things. I used to be a morning person. There was a time when getting up this early would've been easy and I would have been brimming with excitement about heading to a festival. Now my life has been jaded by comedy's late nights and I know I have to do work at the festival so can't get twatted straight away, which is pretty much what's making me sad. I mean, I can get twatted, but I'll have sustain twattishness for some hours without collapsing and I doubt that's possible. I could of course just really ruin the comedy tent by being horribly sick all over it, or just passing out on the stage and not moving for the duration of the three days. I think the latter might actually be a crowd puller.


Last night was a late one. Old Rope works wonderfully at the Komedia. The crowd are lovely and fully understanding of the new material evening. Quite a bit of new things worked, and I had one gag about the Prince of Persia computer games that seemed to work very well. Then there were also a few stinkers such as my terrible one liner ' Do you know what my pet hate is?....Dogs.' I counteracted these bad ones by using Derren Brown subliminal messaging and flashing a bit of paper that I'd written 'FORGET' on, hoping it might erase people's minds of the shit gags. Two of my flyerers from Edinburgh, Katy and Jen, came along as they are Brightonians (Jen is a proper Brightonian, Katy is a temporary Brightonian, but we don't mention it). It was ace to see them and they are not coping with post Edinburgh life too well. They expressed some difficulty is sustaining being near people they didn't know and not trying to sell them a show and flyer them. I wondered if I should cash in on that and give them lots of bits of paper saying where my gigs are around the country. Or, even better, just bits of paper asking them to send me cash. Or like Derren they could hand out bits of paper saying 'forget' and lots of people would wander around with amnesia.


Right, car is packed with tent, wellies, a small boat incase of rain, a bucket of sanity incase mine runs out, and a loo roll. I'll be fine. There shall be little tweeting for the next few days on account of no reception and lack of phone battery. My blog tomorrow will be pre-prepared and posted by Layla and please can none of you tell me how Derren did it till I get back as I'll just watch it then. Even though I'm sure his answer will be 'black magic'.