The Return of the Chocolate Ocelot’s Fringe - Monday

Notice a pile of brown paper bags in our bathroom. A message printed on one side tells me that I will use around 12,000 sanitary products in my lifetime. I find this bold assertion from a piece of lavatorial stationery that doesn’t even know me to be impertinent, not to mention physically unlikely.

Very well. As promised yesterday, I shall endeavour to keep today’s run down a little more brief.

We rise ridiculously early (I think the time starts with a seven) so we can trot over to the Captain’s Bar on South College Street. The event is The Early Word, a chance to listen to a local literary type hold forth on matters Edinburghian. When we get to the pub, it’s just us two, the landlady, and a chap called Alan Foster (or possibly Allan Foster) – author of biographies of Scottish literary figures like Conan Doyle, Burns and Scott. We are thankfully joined by one other person, a weather-beaten old person of indeterminate gender (who later turned out to be a lady) with the tan and dress of someone who has run a lion sanctuary in Africa for 30 years.

Mr Foster entertains us for well over an hour, all sat round one little tale at the back of the pub, with tales of Burns’ love affairs, Doyle pestering his mentor Joseph Bell, and Mark Twain holding Sir Walter Scott responsible for the American Civil War. He does go on quite a lot about Robert Burns, who I just don’t get. I think you have to be a scot, or more likely a rabid Scottish descendant several generations and hundreds of miles removed from Scotland, to really be into him.

http://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/event/227702-the-early-word/

Next, off to see Bagpuss, the live show! Needless to say, the audience is a little younger than most of the shows we are seeing. And about ten times louder. I’d say 50% are around five years old: noisy, and a bit loose at the seams. The rest of the audience – the parents – are in their 30s, so we two 40-yearolds - sans kiddies - out-age them all. The show is cleverly pitched at two levels to give the mums and dads something to follow in between shushing their fidgety, wailing offspring every two minutes. For the children, it’s a series of three adventures involving magical toys, moving pictures and musical interludes. For the adults – a poignant tale of the adult Emily’s descent into madness following the death of her father. Actually teared me up a bit.

By the way, I can do a better Yaffle impression and Bagpuss yawn than either of the ladies on stage though. So.

http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/childrens-shows/bagpuss

Over to the Gilded Balloon for Dr Apple’s Last Lecture. A freaky little play about a repressed psychology professor who embarks on a mind expanding trip into his subconscious, courtesy of a plateful of special cookies. The best bit for me is when he has just started to trip out, and the three female performers, dressed head to toe in day-glo lycra, crawl onto the stage behind him and begin a psychedelic dance routine worthy of The Mighty Boosh. Not sure either of us fully understand the plotline, but entertaining nonetheless.

http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/dr-apple-s-last-lecture

Queuing for Dr Apple, one usually has nothing better to do than stare at walls doors covered with flyers and posters for every conceivable Fringe show. Some of these are intriguing, some of them look funny, and some of them just make me want to punch the faces of the people depicted thereon. It’s the ones I never actually seen perform - some of them just have extraordinarily punchable faces. They either look way too smug (Andrew Bird and Patrick Monahan’s posters come to mind), or it’s their sheer ubiquity, like the bloody smiling baby from the So You Think You’re Funny posters. I swear I’ll smack that kid’s face in if ever I see him or her. Given that they’ve been using the same face for a good 10 years or so, he or she must be a teenager by now at least, so they stand an even chance of dodging my attack.

Then over to the Pleasance for the first time this year. The usual reek of sponsor Foster’s beer pervades the place, and we are posed with the usual problem of figuring out exactly which of the endless Pleasance subvenues in the complex we are supposed to be heading for. Given that we are here to see Ed Reardon: A Writer’s Burden, I should’ve just followed the stream of grey-haired heads. Reardon, the comic creation of Christopher Douglas, takes us through a précis of his life as a frustrated writer and professional grumpy old bugger. Assisted by two actors from ‘Theatre In A Basket’, he re-enacts various scenes from Reardon’s life, usually involving his ego, intolerance for poor punctuation (rah!) and the ‘perpetuation of the sickening contagion of obedience’ - a phrase he manages to incorporate into everything he writes, even the Ladybird Book of Shoes. Decent fun for grumpy old buggers like me.

http://www.pleasance.co.uk/edinburgh/events/ed-reardon-a-writers-burden

After a short break, we return to the Pleasance for Colin Hoult’s Inferno, taking the title of his show once again from an old Dr Who story. I still hope to bump into him on the street and ask him if many people get the running joke. As ever, Colin Hoult plays a variety of bizarre characters, from a dog who’d rather you fetch his banana, to a Thor wannabe from Leeds, to the lonely author of a truly crap poem about a bear. As before, he slips his supporting performers into the audience, to catch us out at the start. Herself identifies Colin’s female colleague (Zoe Gardner) as the woman from Lights, Camera, Walkies! yesterday. I suppose there must be a fair bit of that at the Fringe – people doubling up on shows. If you’re a comic actor stuck there for a month, you wouldn’t want to just do one hour’s worth of show a day I suppose, and it’s not like they can busk around the cabaret / chatshow / bestofthefest gigs like the stand-ups and the musicians.

http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/comedy/colin-hoult-s-inferno

And then our last show of the night – Arthur Smith’s Pissed Up Chat Show at the Pleasance Dome – that weird cavernous student union building off Potterow with the cool caricatured wall hangings. The gig does not get off to a good start, when the queue moves forward to go into the venue and we find ourselves outside the toilets – the daft bint in front of us had taken a wrong turning in the heaving mass of people. Once properly inside, we just manage to find a space to sit that isn’t already occupied or behind a pillar. This is where we saw the late night BBC comedy showcase last year, and is a room composed mainly of stage-obscuring pillars as far as I can tell.

Anyway, Arthur comes on and introduces a couple of acts, some of which have something to do with drinking. It turns out that he himself hasn’t drunk since 2001 and is now diabetic, so he speaks from an interesting position. First guest is the excellent Ed Byrne, who I have just about forgiven for being the annoying voice of a certain mobile phone vendor’s adverts for many a year, followed by an old American hoofer and soul singer call Movin’ Melvin Brown, and then by a couple of gentlemen who have a show devoted to the art of drinking.

More importantly though, we the audience have all filled in little forms beforehand, stating our worst and best experiences whilst drunk. Having only been drunk once, I feel a bit of a fraud, but it’s just for a laugh. Arthur and guests read through the pile of submissions throughout the show, and lo and behold, mine is acclaimed the winner, though that may simply be because it is the last piece of paper in his hand when the show ends. We shall never know. Nevertheless, I come forward to claim my prize, a choice of a pickled egg or a signed copy of his autobiography (slightly soiled by a spilled cocktail). Hurrah for me, though Herself would’ve preferred the egg.

My winning submission? Thing I have most enjoyed doing while drunk: Having a good wee.

http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/comedy/arthur-smith-s-pissed-up-chat-show?day=12-08-2011&performance=33%3A8478

We return to our pad. Although our timetable dictates that tonight is ‘watch DVDs’ night, we instead stay up into the wee hours watching BBC news footage of Croydon burning.

Today’s SlebWatch: Russell Kane, with funny sticky up hair. Possibly. And Shappi Khorsandi getting a chocolate cake in the Gilded Balloon café. Though it may have been Shazia Mirza. This uncertainty makes me feel racist. My suggestion for the next Shappi Khorsandi show: Not Shazia Mirza, The Other One.

The Return of the Chocolate Ocelot’s Fringe - Sunday

I am already falling behind in my daily blog routine. The combination of a busy Fringe timetable and my tortuously slow and rambling diary keeping are edging me toward a 25-hour day, and even copious hunks of tablet and custard creams can’t keep me going that long. So, in an effort to catch up, I am going to really, really try to keep this one short. Let’s see if I succeed…

It is still raining. It has rained all night. Probably. I don’t really know. I haven’t set a pluviometer outside our window to make sure, but it seems pretty much like the same wetness as last night. Our clothes have just about dried off from yesterday, so we set off for a busy 6-event day.

First one just after lunch is on the top floor of the Beehive Inn on Grassmarket, so hardly any distance for us to walk. Huzzah. Cheese-Badger: The Epic of Hairy Dave is a brilliantly performed almost-one-man show, courtesy of Sir Henry Cheese-Badger (I suspect that may not be his real name). This rake-thin young chap delivers, with occasional built-in prompts from his man-servant Grosvenor (a fellow bearing an uncanny resemblance to Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), an hour-long saga of obesity, vegetables, beards, messianic mania and obsession. All in rhyme and one of those hrolling Northern accents you never hear spoken by real people under the age of 70. Excellent.

http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/comedy/cheese-badger-presents-the-epic-of-hairy-dave-free

Next up is Lights, Camera, Walkies, at the Gilded Balloon, a splendid 3-person show about the disastrous shooting of a Hollywood action movie which has been recast at the eleventh hour with two rival dogs instead of a human star. The two chaps and one lady play a variety of parts each, darting back and forth from behind a kennel-like screen, miming pooches, flinging clothes off and on and taking on an array of lunatic characters and voices. I think my favourite performer is the tall gangly fellow (Richard David Caine) who plays the laid-back stoner dog-trainer, the inebriated English director and the manic Korean director. Tight, well-acted stuff.

http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/lights-camera-walkies

And now a short digression. Long-time subscribers to the Pouch will recall my many insecurities re: my appearance. Indeed it was at last year’s Fringe that I spectacularly tried and failed to master the ‘copious swathe of hair swept across forehead’ look of the young gels, and also singularly did not rock an ill-advised ‘roll-neck sweater and combat pants’ look. This year, I am happy to announce, my sartorial experience at Edinburgh is much improved. Not only am I sporting a rather flattering sleeveless stripy top that hides my biscuit-tum and exaggerates my boyish hips, but I am also the proud owner of a proper bloody fringe, courtesy of Herself’s chum Mel. Said crop not only masks a multitude of foreheadial sins, not the least of which is an 8-inch scalp-line incision scar which suggests that I have been one of Dr Hfuhruhurr’s patients, but it also looks very pretty indeed when brushed correctly and in minimal wind. And to cap it all off, my current handbag is now entering its eighth month of good service without falling apart, eating my stuff or just bloody annoying me as it bounces around against my hip. Wonders will not cease.

After the dog show we nip just down to Bedlam, that weird churchy venue stuck in a wedge between Bristo Place and Forrest Road. There we see Vertigo. Not as you might suspect an adaptation of the Hitchcock classic, but a split performance where two plays, both with the name Vertigo, have been booked for the same venue and time. Breaking the 4th wall thoroughly, the characters of Tim and Philippa manage to perform their respective pieces about a young man’s fear of everything and a young lady’s relentless quest to recapture a brief sense of childhood wonder, without resorting to a predictable ‘war of the luvvies’ format. It’s actually very sweet and you don’t really know where it’s going. Good luck to ‘em for the rest of the run.

http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/vertigo

As is often the case at the Fringe, we find ourselves in an audience comprised largely of performers for other shows, either coming to watch their friends on stage, or simply sat in the front row because they’re on next. We wish the girls who clamber onto the stage at the end of Vertigo good luck.

After a late lunch, we then must nip over North Bridge to the Voodoo Rooms on West Register Street. Here we see The Bitch Doctors, a sort of afternoon cabaret-cum-chat show, hosted by the excellent Desmond O’Connor (no, not that one), who we saw last year as one third of Me, Me, Me! with Mr B the gentleman rhymer. Accompanied by two guest ‘doctors’ - circusy balancey juggly bloke Mat Ricardo and musicky ukuleley lady Helen Arney - Des proceeds to entertain a small but enthusiastic audience with bawdy tunes, anecdotes and gossip from the cabaret circuit, as well as fielding mental, emotional and health problems suggested by the audience. Herself amazes and/or disgusts performers and punters alike with a brief display of her dyspraxic bendiness, and I discuss my terror of being attacked by a blue whale. For once my fear of gig interaction is not too bad, because they are all nice to me, and my voice is not too blokey neither.

http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/cabaret/bitch-doctors
http://helenarney.com/
http://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/event/229331-mat-ricardo-three-balls-and-a-new-suit/

It is still raining by the way. It has been all day, and will continue to rain until well after beddie-byes tonight. We have but 25 minutes to rush back across North Bridge to a little venue near Chambers Street, where we are scheduled to rendezvous with our regular fellow fringers Dr Foot and heterosexual fringe mate Mitchell. We make it with ten minutes to spare, impressed with our own speed and agility in negotiating wet streets crowded with fat arses, wheelchairs and doddery old dears. We’re like a two-player version of Spy Hunter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_Hunter

At this point, I’m going to diverge slightly from my usual review format, by not telling you exactly what we see, or where. The reason for this is that the show is not terribly good. Herself’s granny once said, if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all. I however am torn between sparing the performers a right slagging from a snarky nobody like me, and telling you how so-bad-it’s-funny the show is. If this was just you and me in the kitchen, I’d happily name and shame them, but this is a public bloggy type thing, and I’d feel bad tearing into people I don’t even know who’ve gone to all the trouble, time and expense of putting on an Edinburgh show. So it’s going to be as anonymous as I can make it, but given the subject matter, that may prove a little difficult. Bear with me.

OK, so the show is about a famous historical figure. This much we know going in. What we don’t know is that the performers are rather young, late teens, early twenties perhaps. Young, and on the whole not all that experienced, actorally speaking. This does however become apparent within two minutes of the play starting (albeit fifteen minutes late). There’s an awful lot of poorly rehearsed ‘general chat’ between a gaggle of female characters, which is neither realistic-but-improvised dialogue nor stagily orchestrated background chatter. It’s a bunch of girls all saying ‘Oh hello, Mary.’ and the like over the top of each other.

Then there are the boys. One of these chaps, looking like a gangly young Jason Flemyng, seems to act his best when a bag has been placed over his head (don’t ask) but the rest of the time is a little cartoony in his delivery. Though compared to the other young fellow, he’s Daniel Day-Lewis. This other lad, sporting a trainee beard (almost) is the most am of drams we’ve seen so far. He marches up and down the stage relentlessly, not knowing what to do with his arms, and has mastered… the art of pausing… every four or five… syllables as he speaks… to give the air… of a measured… delivery. Once I notice it, it’s all I can concentrate on. Well, that and the wandering accents. When one of the character says to another: 'What part of Norfolk you from, dearie?’ I am hard pressed not to shout out ‘Dublin, via Sydney’.

Yet if there is one piece of advice I would give this young drama group, it would be to dispense with all the needless scene shifting. The stage is little more than a curtained-off black square, as are many of the improvised venues in Edinburgh. But this production has chosen to use a couple of big wooden blocks onstage, to serve as bar, bed, mortuary slab and so forth. All well and good you might think, but the kids have to shift these big squeaky things around after every single bloody scene, in the dark, often taking thirty seconds to a minute. Just to flip wooden block A over and shove wooden block B to the other side of the twelve foot stage. It’s just not worth it for the hassle and time lost. I swear they could shave the play down by ten minutes if they just left the fershlugginer blocks in one place and used them more sensibly. Tch.

On the positive side of the show, I would say that the make-up is very good, especially the young ladies’ blacked out teeth. One of the performers (she played the mad old bird) was a passable actor, and the bag with eyeholes was sturdily made.

At last the show ends, with a shock-gasp revelation. Or is it a question mark? Ah, think on. Myself, Herself, Dr Foot and HFM Mitchell all congratulate ourselves on not sniggering out loud through the performance and we scamper off. Being charitable to the youngsters putting this on, and considering their age and inexperience, I would give this show the one-word rating of Bless.

http://www.madeuplink.com/

The two of us bid farewell to the others, thus ending our crossover Fringe team-up for another year. They are off to consume more booze no doubt, having already divided their time equally between pubs and gigs for the preceding weekend. Exchanging recommendations of shows seen (they: Gerry Sadowitz, we: Subsist), we scamper off into the soggy evening to once again cross North Bridge, for to see Mr Phillward Jupitus, late of Never Mind The Buzzcocks and Radio 6 Music.

As it turns out, this is Phill’s first stand-up gig in ten years, encouraged to do so by his comedy chum Eddie Izzard. This fact is related by a lengthy but entertaining impression of Mr Izzard, which frankly I could listen to all night. Phill himself has lost a fair bit of weight this year, and he does look the better for it. At first I’m worried that he’s just going to rehash old material, as he starts off with his ‘My (six year old) daughter brought her boyfriend round for the first time’ story, but thankfully he admits that this is just a warm-up, as well as a prequel for a newer story, this time about his now 16-year old daughter bringing her boyfriend over to stay the night.

Phill is as funny as he ever was and I am pleased to have dragged Herself along to see him, as I’ve had a real soft spot for his comedy ever since his Star Wars-themed Ready, Jedi, Go well over ten years ago (his miming of a romantic encounter between Chewbacca and a less than compliant Ewok will haunt me forever). The one down side is that the venue – The Stand over on George Street - is only half seated and we, arriving late, must (no pun intended) stand at the back and peer over the heads of the rest of the crowd. Not too much of a problem for one as lengthy as I, but Herself at a modest 5 foot 4 inches must constantly weave and swerve her head from right to left in order to peer through constantly bobbing bonces before her. But a bloody good show nonetheless.

http://edinburghfestival.list.co.uk/event/229311-phill-jupitus-stand-down/

And then back to the apartment at a reasonable hour for once. Hurrah! Except that I then spend a good hour formatting the previous day’s blog. Tch. I swear tomorrow’s one will be a bloody bullet point list.

Today’s SlebWatch: No-one! We see nobody even remotely famous today, apart from Phill Jupitus. I expect they are all attending church. Or maybe the more famous you get, the more water soluble you become. That’s probably it.

The Return of the Chocolate Ocelot’s Fringe - Saturday

Our first morning in Edinburgh. I discover that the shower is decent sized and comes with a movable head. This is in sharp contrast to a shower we encountered recently while staying in Belgium. It was big, ridiculously big – a purpose built stone booth capable of accepting 4 people at a time, but unfortunately it only had the one immobile showerhead fixed into the ceiling. Perfect for Cheval, the star of A Town Called Panic (coincidentally also Belgian), but less than ideal for a human. It also looked a bit Auschwitzy.

Herself is up with the lark, unlike myself, who prefers to rise with the Sumatran Twoextrahoursinbed bird. As is her wont, she nips round the corner to the Saturday Farmers’ Market on King’s Stables Road to seek out various foodstuffs. I myself am not that bothered with farmers’ markets – I can see the fine and noble reasons for supporting local producers and encouraging a diverse range of goods, but the end result is usually a load of stalls selling slightly different sausages that you pay 50% more for. She returns from said market with a few items to sustain us later on, including a curious breaded product called a cheese swirl, a flat round doughy affair containing as much sesame seed as cheese. Not one to eat on a first date.

I spend the morning blogging the previous day, and feeling guilty about so readily accepting the verb blogging into my life. Unlike last year, I am trying this time to post each day up within 24 hours, rather than leave it a week so I have more time to spellcheck and what have you. Consequently I am now finding that my blogging (there I go again) is taking up more of my actual Fringe-going time than before. This is mainly due to my inability to type on my new laptop (the keys are spaced out differently), and the enormous amount of time it takes to correctly format the text on Blogger (cutting and pasting from Word is a trial in itself, and don’t get me started on positioning pictures). I resolve this year to keep my daily entries shorter and not to wander off onto side issues.

Bugger.

First event of the day – Auld Reekie Roller Girls at the Meadowbank sports centre east of the city centre. We walk from our flat, down Cowgate, past Holyrood and the Dynamic Scottish Earth Parliament (actually, they may be two different buildings, but they seem to have been all mixed up together), and skirt the foot of Arthur’s Seat, watching people and dogs scramble up the grassy slopes, as a light sprinkling of rain evolves into a proper grown-up shower.

Words are exchanged between myself and my petite companion, vis the heights of our respective brollies. Mine towers above, providing shelter for all and a threat to none. Hers hovers just above her wee head, which is tragically also at my eye level. Watching its broken spoke swing perilously towards my face in my peripheral vision gives me some cause for concern. A compromise walking arrangement is agreed upon, which favours the single file rather than the classic wing-man formation, though it does look like we’ve had an argument or have adopted some sort of fundamentalist Muslim relationship.

We go to the roller derby event because I’ve never been to one before, but have caught glimpses on local news stories and the like. It’s like the one time we went to see the monster trucks – it’s something everyone ought to do at least once. Like bisexuality or eating horsemeat. Anyway, the roller girl event turns out to be a match between Edinburgh’s Cannon Belles, also confusingly known as the Auld Reekie Roller Girls, and Glasgow’s Maiden Grrders, also known as the Glasgow Roller Girls. This didn’t help, as I thought at first there were four teams involved. The audience is primarily female, and of all ages, but I would say mainly in their twenties.

But it’s not the gender of the teams and audience per se that makes this such a uniquely female sporting event, it’s all the peripheral bits around the match. First off, there’s a merchandise hall selling t-shirts of the team as you would expect, but also jewellery and accessories, nail treatments and hair styling. And there’s a charity bun stall, selling fairy cakes and flapjacks and muffins and tablet! This is not Luton Town football stadium.

A lot of the players, audience and traders seem to be sporting a special roller girl look too – a kind of lesbian-chic/rockabilly thing, with half shaven heads, pink hair and tattoos. My god, the tattoos, everywhere, on everything. I’m really surprised more men don’t go to these things.

The other fun thing about roller derby is that all the players use aliases, as do the refs (of which there are many with all sorts of different responsibilities. One has the job of marking out the lead jammer by pointing at them constantly from the centre of the track, looking rather like a trainer at the Spanish riding school). Names like Debris Harry, Coco Pox, and Apocalypse Cow. Brilliant. It’s like they’re all pro wrestlers or drag queens. I manage to jot down a few roller girl names myself during odd moments throughout the rest of the day. So far I have Princess Sleia, Eva Destruction, LeAnn Crimes and Greyfriars Barbie. You should try it.

We stay for the entire match, having half understood the rules of jamming, blocking, time outs and so forth, and have gotten rather into the spirit of the thing. We cheer at the right moments, I hope, and leave the Edinburgh ladies celebrating a storming victory over Glasgow. Edinburgh seemed to have actual teamwork on their side, not to mention faster wee girls for the jamming and tougher fat lasses for the blocking. All good natured stuff – go and watch some time.

http://www.arrg.co.uk/

We emerge into the rain which shows no sign of abating, and slosh back into town. By this time I am hopped up on sweet sugary tablet and skipping around on the pavement, much to Herself’s amusement. Her tartan brolly, a relic of last year’s Fringe, finally gives up the ghost in a wet squall, and I magnanimously replace it with a see through spotty one, though I really wanted to find a Wee Bobby brolly, just to annoy her. We kill time before our next show by lurking inside Forbidden Planet to buy a Batman-related book as a present for a friend. I manage to pick out the most expensive one there – The Return Of Bruce Wayne - damn you, deluxe editions. I also discover that the legendary John Byrne has finally begun a sequel to his series Next Men from the 90s. Hurrah. Though I seem to have missed issues 1 – 6. Boo.

Next, we see – at last! - Barry Cryer at the Gilded Balloon, thus making up for last year’s cancelled show. Mr Cryer gives us a slick hour of jokes and anecdotes based on letters of the alphabet, so building in useful aides-memoir into the structure of the show. He does a damn fine Dave Allen impression too. We keep our eyes out for a friend of a friend who is also supposed to be there, but since the only description I have is ‘He looks like Alfred E Newman from Mad magazine’, I fail to pick him out, and balk at asking a reasonable protuberantly-eared gentlemen if he is my target, we do not find him.

http://www.gildedballoon.co.uk/tickets/performances.php?eventId=14:70

Next, off down the Royal Mile for a free Norman Lovett gig. We can’t believe he is free, as he’s a pretty big name, albeit of times past perhaps. It is indeed too good to be true, as we discover that despite being a free non-ticketed show, the venue has instituted its own ‘turn up early and a get a token (read: ticket) from the bar’ booking system. Thus he is well sold out by the time we turn up, and have to squelch back out into the rain, a little miffed.

Herself’s new brolly, barely 3 hours old, also gives up the ghost in a moderate wind. We are devastated, as if suffering an umbrella cot death.

Now thoroughly soaked, we kill the time that should have been Lovett o’clock by lurking around the Radisson hotel on the Royal Mile. Not only is this the venue of our next gig, but it is large, warm, has seats, and is out of the bloody rain, now entering its tenth consecutive hour. I spend my time listening to two young stand-ups on the table behind us reading reviews of their shows from websites, rehashing how their performances went, and deconstructing individual gags. Fascinating stuff.

We then troop upstairs for The Museum of Horrors. The audience is small, perhaps 14, but fortunately we still outnumber the cast (which is not always the case). A fun little show (though not spooky), it’s a reality show spoof where the four housemates of the museum are picked off one at a time in a series of hilariously gory ways, accompanied by copious intentionally cheap props. The show is introduced by a fantastically hammy shaven-headed chap channelling his inner Lugosi with all his might and pulling the most glorious villainous gurns. The storyline makes very little sense if you pause to think about it, but it’s light fun for a late night.

http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/museum-of-horror

Our final show of the day is a cabaret called Sweet Release at the Apex hotel on Grassmarket, not far from our flat. We kill time beforehand once more in a hotel foyer, huddling by a radiator and amusing ourselves by watching the incoherent drunks and inappropriately dressed girls stagger up and down the sodden street outside in search of a taxi driver with no common sense.

We are disappointed for the second time today when we get up to go into the show. No-one is around, and there are faint sounds of performance from inside the venue. The chap at the box office table tells us that the show started thirty minutes ago. How can this be, we ask, holding up our 23:45 tickets. Ah, those are the old tickets, he says. When the show was briefly cancelled and then reinstated, they brought the time forward by half an hour. You can go in for the last bit he says. Bums we say. And shlump off into the rain for the final time that night. Bah. I console myself with a packet of custard creams and shouting at Horatio Caine on the telly.

Today’s SlebWatch: Rich Fulcher, a little hung over by the look of him, Steve Frost of the Comedy Store Players, and possibly him off of Two Pints of Lager – no not the one from The Royle Family, the other one, with the shaven head, can’t remember his name, probably Lee. Lee Bloke. That’s him.

The Return of the Chocolate Ocelot’s Fringe - Friday

Location: Skelmanthorpe, near Huddersfield. Spend much of morning discussing the relative heights of the Emley Moor TV mast and a Martian fighting machine with a five year old (nearly six). Remainder of morning devoted to perfecting our martial skills with the punchy-stick, an ingenious combination of rubber bath ball, plastic slide binder, and five-foot runner bean cane. I demonstrate my ability to hurl said weapon the length of the back garden and hit a child-size wooden biplane on the tailfin, thus rocking the five year old’s world. I can see now why people have kids – it’s so they can show off their mediocre adult abilities to someone with no reference points.

Thence we pile into our noble conveyance Elwood and proceed north to Scotland. As we are travelling to the Fringe by car this year and not train, I am afforded the luxury of far more packing space than I really need, and thus have brought enough clothes, footwear, bedding and reading material to see out a brief global disaster. The soundtrack to our journey past Leeds, Newcastle and Jedburgh is the audiobook of Where The Bodies Are Buried, by Christopher Brookmyre, an appropriately Scottish author who has written a number of thrilleresque contemporary tales with largely forgettable titles. One exception is the recent Pandemonium, which for once contains a clue to the story’s subject in the title, and is highly recommended by myself and Herself.

After a brief stop in West Auckland for a very fine grated cheese roll, we take the long undulating A68 into Scotland, predictably getting stuck behind large slow moving horseboxes. This happened to me before, well over 10 years ago on the way back from Edinburgh – a tour coach was poodling along at 30 miles an hour and we were stuck right behind it, with another 20 odd cars behind us, all fuming at the prospect of another umpteen miles following this lumbering beast. Thinking boldly, I spotted that there was a village lying ahead, just parallel to the A68, which I could use as a sort of short cut to leap ahead of the coach. Unfortunately, I hesitated for a second too long at the junction out of the village, and the coach lumbered past the front of us. Followed by the rest of the traffic queue which proceeded, to a man, to not let me back in until they had all passed, the bastards.

We reach Edinburgh, more or less hitting the afternoon rush hour and navigate into the city centre, where we decant a car-load of luggage into our swanky holiday apartment. This year we have relocated from Castle Wynd (too close to the nightly Tattoo crowds, too many steps, a springless sofa and the smallest toilet known to humanity) to Kings Stables: still within the shadow of the castle, but a more spacious two-storey affair with a fabulous metal spiral staircase and a bathroom sufficient to swing a relatively short-tailed cat for once.

While Herself stocks up at the local Sainsbury’s, I leap back into Elwood before Edinburgh’s diligent traffic wardens slap a ticket on him, and drive all the way out to one of the city’s satellite park-and-rides. This feels very odd, having already driven into the centre only to turn around and drive out again and dump my lovely car in some anonymous car park for a week. I should point out that the park-and-ride, I’m not saying which one, is patrolled and monitored 24 hours a day by CCTV, guards and vicious Scottish attack lobsters, so don’t even think about stealing Elwood. Anyway, he does rubbish mileage and he has the turning circle of the Exxon Valdez.

On the bus back into the city, I read a free Metro paper and am dismayed to come across an article debunking the popular folk story of Greyfriars Bobby. Apparently there were two dogs; the first just being a stray that the graveyard warden kept fed, rather than the mythic loyal hound mourning at his dead master’s grave; the second being a younger Skye Terrier that the local businessmen cynically brought in when the first died, just to keep the tourist trade coming in. I think they did the same thing with Eddie in Frasier. Shocking. My world crumbles just a little more around me.

Hook up with Herself just outside Fringe venue 18 – Sweet Grassmarket – with literally 4 minutes to go before our first show of the 2011 festival. Herself has thoughtfully brought along two freshly made peanut butter sandwiches to sustain me, which I proceed to eat one covert bite at a time during the blacked-out scene changes of the performance. Said show is Subsist (DBS Productions), an excellent tale of four unnamed people trying to survive two years into a zombie apocalypse. It’s small, minimal, and excellently written and acted. And also Scottish by all indications, which is actually a refreshing change for the Fringe, which can often seem to be a decidedly English affair. All in all, Subsist is a bloody good play about zombies which never shows one of the walking dead or even says the z-word. It could equally have been about people surviving after a nuclear war or a shipwreck I suppose, but then you don’t get the fun of waiting for the ominous thumps at the front door…

http://www.dbs-productions.co.uk/

We race out of the venue, nip back to the apartment for me to grab a coat, and then back down Grassmarket and on to the Gilded Balloon Teviot, once again occupying the courtyard and rambling neo-gothic (I pinched the neo-gothic bit from the Fringe programme – I have no idea about architecture) building of Teviot Row House – the oldest purpose-built student union building in the world (according to Wikipedia). We shuffle into the Billiard Room antechamber and are hit by a beery wave of hot air wafting off our fellow Fringe-goers. Ominously, Herself and I are issued by adhesive name badges as we troop into the Billiard Room itself, which fills me with my well-documented fear of comedy interaction. As we are about to see Rich Fulcher – the American one off of The Mighty Boosh – I am more than a little concerned that either or both of us will at some point in the next hour be dragged up on stage and forced to oil his prominent moobs or some such.

But my fears are unfounded, as only a hapless sap in the front row (Ha! Sucker.) is picked out for interaction, as Mr Fulcher induces him to take a megaphone out into the Assembly courtyard and entice total strangers to gather round him ‘for free money’, all the while being filmed by Arno, Rich’s endearing young comedy stooge. The show is as mad and (possibly staged) shambolic as you might expect from Rich Fulcher, but fun and silly and positive too. Plus, Herself and I agree that we like the way Arno speaks – maybe it’s his slightly androgynous American tones that we responded too, or his big Indian puppy-dog eyes.

http://tinyactsofrebellion.com/

Then an hour or so to kill before out last show of our first day, so I grab a rather fine sugar and lemon crepe from outside the Gilded Balloon, and we wander south to George Square, where the Assembly (Rooms) have developed a swanky upmarket sideshow venue in the last few years – all artificial lawns, uplit trees, open-air heaters and purpose built mobile theatres that looks like a cross between a nineteenth century carny and the set of Moulin Rouge (shudder).

Here, we see Mr Andrew O’Neill, a splendid young fellow whose progress we have tracked (not in a creepy way you understand) over the last couple of years. An eclectic and energetic gentlemen, Andrew is a musician, stand-up comedian, steampunk performer, and self-proclaimed gendernaut (a term I thought I had invented, but hey). He also runs occasional Jack the Ripper tours of London’s east end, where he (ahem) convincingly argues that the Ripper was none other than a young Winston Churchill.

Tonight, Andrew is in comedian/musician mode, and delivers a highly entertaining hour of anecdotes, songs and Harry Hill-esque non-sequiturs, loosely strung together along the theme of leading an alternate lifestyle. All jolly good stuff. We are brave after the show and trot up to say hello briefly, name-dropping one of his fellow steampunk band members from The Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing in a pathetic attempt to raise our stock a degree above the regular groupies. I’m sure he saw right through it, but it’s nice to pretend you’re saying hello to a friend after his gig.

http://www.andrewoneill.co.uk/

Nursing a headache from not having drunk anything since 11’o-clock that morning, I am led back to our apartment by Herself, where we slump in front of the telly to watch Team America: World Police. I am delighted to discover that Herself has done me proud by snagging the last of the original recipe custard creams from Sainsbury’s. As you are no doubt aware, they recently changed (read: downgraded) the recipe for a distinctly crapper formula, thus ending a decades-long love affair between myself and Sainsbury’s. Sniff.

I manage to keep my eyes open long enough to catch the bit in Team America with the deadly ‘panthers’ but start to flag by the time Matt Damon utters his legendary catchphrase. We wobble down the metal stairs to Bedfordshire.

Today’s SlebWatch: Wright Stuff regular Hardeep Singh Kohli on a bicycle (wearing his trademark pink turban), Horrible Histories actor and O2 front man Jim Howick (sporting trademark ginger beard and cricket sweater), and the boy from Primeval (sporting neither crap beard, nor little hat, nor whining ‘Abby!’)

The Fourth Sense

Let’s talk about extra senses. I’m not talking about the three that we all know about – sight, vision and touch, but those others that some gifted individuals profess to possess. Like ‘Smell’ and ‘Taste’.

I myself cannot lay claim to either of those extra senses. Some sort of rudimentary gustatory feedback around the tongular area perhaps – I can tell if things are a bit sweet or salty – but all that talk you hear from people reading all sorts of odd elements in their glass of wine like ‘woody’, ‘flowery’, ‘smoky’, ‘nosy’, ‘happy’ or ‘greedy’, they’re just making that shit up. Same with this so-called ‘smell’ you’ll hear about. Apparently different things give off different ‘scents’, but unless a rat has actually climbed into our fridge and died of amoebic dysentery right there by the Lurpak, I wouldn’t ‘smell’ a thing.

Now you might be thinking that I’m exaggerating, but I’m not, not by much anyway. An accident of birth has left me somewhat bereft of smell, which the boffins at science-central tell us also accounts for a loss of taste. Taste is 25% smell (made-up statistic)! Amazing! If only vision was 50% sound – concerts and crowded train journeys would be awesome.

The disappointing outcome of my nose-blindness and tastelessness is that my other senses were not sharpened to an amazing degree to compensate for my loss. No crime-fighting career a la Daredevil or Sue Thomas F.B.Eye for me. Shame – who knows how I might have used my ability to really touch things to solve impossible mysteries?

On the other hand, the incredible dullness of my tongue’s receptors means that I am able to consume an entire packet of Trebor’s Extra Strong Mints whilst necking a mug of hot tea at the same time, with very few ill-effects. If you don’t count belching like Level 4 Pit Fiend immediately afterward.

Onto another mythic sense now – common sense.

Yesterday I had occasion to get my tyres changed. Well, not mine, my car’s. You know what I mean. I have had Elwood, a rather swanky Chrysler PT Cruiser, for a little over a year. Elwood is the successor to the late lamented Barry and came with a lovely set of new wheels, so I had no reason to get any of them replaced until now.

And lo, I mooch on down to the local vulcanised rubber outlet for a new set of tyres, only to be asked by the mechanic for the ‘wheel nut lock’. What’s a wheel nut lock, I ask. It’s a lock for your wheel nuts, replies the mechanic. I shall skip over the rest of our routine and cut to the chase: Apparently Chryslers come with a special little doodad that you need to unscrew the wheels. This is to prevent scamps from pinching them. If you don’t have the special little metal thingy that ‘came with your car’, you can’t get the wheels off.

It should be in my car somewhere, I am told. Maybe the ashtray, or the drinks holder, or the glove compartment, or the secret place in the boot where they stash the jack. We look. We do not find. I don’t remember ever seeing a little round metal thing like the end of a socket set rattling Elwood’s interior in the 14 months I’ve had him. Maybe the dealer never gave it to me. Maybe it fell out the door one day. Or maybe, and here my stomach sinks and my brain attempts to skip over the memory, I discovered a random bit of a socket set in the car door compartment about 10 months ago and just chucked it away. I’m not saying I definitely did, but I might have done. I might well have done.

Why? Why did I chuck out a vital metal thingy that I would need 10 months later? Why didn’t I think, question what on earth it was, and save myself hundreds of pounds getting my wheel nuts drilled out (ahem) and new ones put in?

Why? Because I have no common sense, that’s why. I’d never heard of wheel nuts, never examined my car’s wheels with any diligence, and never considered that something that looks a bit like a left-over tool from the car dealership might be an important component of my noble conveyance. It would have taken an act of mental agility, a leap of imagination beyond my mechanically-challenged experience, to even conceive of the remote possibility that the little metal thingy that I (possibly) threw out was something called a wheel nut.

No common sense, you may say. But I reply that there is no such thing as common sense. We’re not born with greater or lesser amounts of some magical ability to make the right decision in all circumstances. We’re not gifted with varying pages from the Secret Book Of How To Do Stuff. No. What common sense is, if you ask me, is Remembering Shit That Went Wrong Before. That’s what it is for me at least.

I have no common sense to speak of, I will freely admit that. I was born bereft of Nouse, innocent of Original Sense. But I have cocked a lot of things up. I have put glue on the wrong side of home-made greetings cards. I have washed fragile glasses with hefty saucepans whilst wearing slippery rubber gloves. I have put whites in with coloureds and let bras and tights roam loose inside the washing machine. I have thrown supposedly dead fireworks onto a bonfire. I have left my car overnight in a Manchester service station. I have walked into a ‘surly local bastards only’ bar and ordered 3 cokes and a G&T. Cock-ups all. And some of those cock-ups I remember. And some of those that I remember, I do not cock up again. Maybe this is what we call common sense. Cock-Up + Memory = Common Sense.

Some lucky buggers doubtless do not cock things up. They either get lucky and do the right thing, or else are party to that mysterious well of all world knowledge that I am not. Or maybe they read the bloody car manual first. Wish I bloody had.

Bully For Me

Let me tell you about a thing that happened to me once. It’s not a story; it’s a real thing that really happened. Consequently it doesn’t exactly have a neat ending or a moral. Maybe there’s a lesson in there, but I don’t think it’s a very nice one. I don’t know. You read and decide.

This is what happened to me in the first year of secondary school. I suppose these days you would call it year 7 of high school or some such, but back in the early 1980s it was most definitely secondary school, or what we kids sometimes called Big School.

Big School was different to the junior school which I had just left. There was a uniform for a start; where before I had run around all day in jeans or cords and t-shirts or my mum’s hand-knitted jumpers, now I was expected to wear a shirt and tie and a blazer and a cap. And trousers of course, you mucky thing. I don’t think the whole uniform thing agreed with me, especially the shirts and ties, but that’s a longer story for another time.

The other thing about Big School was that it was big. Obviously. Big in size (there were, I don’t know, almost a thousand children, compared to maybe 250 at junior school), big in buildings, big in teachers (there were like twenty or more of them and some of them were old men who reeked of cigarettes and pipes – I’d been used to a handful of nice mumsy teachers) and big in terms of the other pupils. Some of them were seven years older than us little kids, for goodness’ sake – they still looked vaguely like children but were impossibly huge and stretched out with deep voices and weird hair and an almost palpable aura about them that warned Little Kids Keep Away. You could just sense it. There was a lot for a little first year to be intimidated by.

The playground game of 1978.
I blame Dave Gibbons.

But what I wasn’t intimidated by were the other first years. Not to begin with anyway. Despite being one of the bright ones and somewhat on the skinny side, I had never had a rough time at junior school. Far from it, I am ashamed to admit I had been a bit of a violent horror when playing football at break times. Actually it had briefly transformed into Aeroball, as one of the others had got ahold of an early 2000AD issue and decided that running around with the ball in one hand whilst pretending to fly an invisible jetpack up to a floating ‘aero-goal’ (I suppose) was definitely the playground sport of the future. It was the Quidditch of 1978.

As I say, I had had my moments of being a little hooligan, lashing out at the other kids in my team when we were doing badly. And for that I should like to apologise to Andrew, Nigel, Duncan and anyone else that I think I might have punched in a 10-year old rage. Sorry. I was horrible.

So I had made it through junior school with nary a whit of bullying, save for that which I had inflicted myself. All of which made what happened during my first few months at Big School a massive shock.

The school was streamed, so that children of a similar educational ability were grouped together into classes of around 30 each. The idea being that they could all then receive something like a similar schooling without leaving some kids behind and boring others to death. Essentially what streaming meant was that it became screamingly obvious who were the clever kids and who were the slow kids. The way they determined this for we first years was to just put us all in randomly sorted classes (chunked up alphabetically, as I recall) for the first month or so, set a few basic tests in English, Maths etc, and then allocate each child to one of 6 streamed classes, ranging from 1Alpha at the top, to 1A, 1Beta, 1B, 1Gamma and 1C at the bottom.


Is it just me or is this bloody sinister?

Yeah, not exactly the Sorting Hat. But actually there is a bit of a Potter parallel here – I can’t imagine what the kids who got sent to Slytherin thought when they were ’sorted’, but unless they were already outright cackly junior Death Eaters I suspect they might just have been a little peeved to have been shoved in The Evil House and practically expected by all the others children – and the teachers - to be duplicitous, cruel, malevolent little shits – talk about your cultural programming. And as for the Hufflepuff kids, you might as well just tell them not to bother with anything, as they are basically The Fat House (apart from Cedric and look what happened to him).

No, the parallel with the Sorting Hat is that streaming in schools, for good or ill, marks out everyone in the school year as being either bright, brightish, above average, so-so, a little slow, or a complete thicky. And that sort of sets expectations – expectations in the children’s work and in how they behave to each other. Where in junior school you had much smaller school years, maybe just two classes, where children of all abilities were mixed in together, now they were separated. Marked out. Ghettoised even. A whole class of average kids. A whole class of clever clever little swots. A whole class of children with learning difficulties, some of whom might not be well disposed to the clever clever little swots.

Anyway, back to the story. Incident. Thing. I ended up in class 1Alpha. Hooray for me. I made one or two new friends. We started proper classes. I learnt how to write the symbol for Alpha on all my exercise books. So far so good. Except there had been a bit of a glitch in the streaming process. You might say that the Sorting Hat had had a bad hat day. What had happened was that one of the boys who should have been placed in 1C or 1Gamma had somehow ended up in 1Alpha.

It wasn’t all that obvious at first, at least not to us kids. It wasn’t like we were looking at each other’s homework marks, or at least I wasn’t. Maybe the teachers knew or guessed that not everyone in the class was coping with the level of the lessons, but if so, they took their time about dealing with the problem.


Not Peter Kay's finest hour.

The problem, as far as 11-year old me was concerned, was a boy called Mark. Mark was chunky but not big, pale and a little freckly, with messy dark hair and fat wet red lips, the lower of which always seemed to hang open in a fashion that perfectly captured his attitude of slack-jawed, open-mouthed adolescent male hostility. Looking back on him now, he looked a lot like a truculent 11-year old Peter Kay, if you can imagine such a thing. A sort of bizarro Kay-child that might fail to spend his teenage years storing away childhood observations for later regurgitation in a nan-friendly stand-up routine but move straight on to becoming a real live Abzorbaloff.

For all I know Mark had done really well in his early tests and completely deserved his place in the top class. Maybe something had gone wrong subsequently and he wasn’t able to cope with the schoolwork. Maybe a parent had just died or he’d recently been hit on the head by a frying pan repeatedly; I don’t know. What I do know though is that Mark, from the moment he was put in a class full of clever little boys and girls, started bullying the rest of us.

Don’t ask me how he bullied us; I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure it was physical, of the pushing / kicking / tripping / spitting variety. And I think there was an awful lot of verbal intimidation as well. Quite possibly he called someone a Joey. The details elude me after thirty years, but I remember how it made me feel. See, I’d never really been bullied before and now here was this piggy-eyed, dough-faced chubber shoving me and the rest of the skinny swots around. I didn’t know how to react.


Sadly the only picture of the Softies I could find,
so you'll have to imagine the detail on Spotty's face.

Actually, the ‘skinny’ bit’s an interesting point – all the boys in the clever class were, with the exception of Mark, physically unimpressive. As I recall, we had more than our share of skinny kids (hello), several minor handicaps (a missing finger here, a blind eye there) and a fair few who were just a bit, well, spacky. If you had to put together real-life models for Walter the Softy’s softies, we were it. Maybe one tall or big – but smart - lad in our class would have made all the difference, would maybe have given Mark someone who he couldn’t naturally overwhelm with his weight and pudgy fists, but as it was, the vagaries of the genetic lottery had conspired to make 1Alpha a class full of weedy boys. And girls of course, but I think they had largely managed to escape Mark’s bullying. They probably had their own girl-bullying thing going on with some sort of nasty name-calling cowbag, but the girls were effectively In A Different Comic to the boys at the time. DC rather than Marvel, if you will.

So I had no idea what to do. Here was this kid pushing us all around, apparently because we were all gay joey boffs or something, day in day out, and there seemed no end in sight. Of course, nobody said anything to the teachers. You just didn’t. I think it was called the sin of Telling or Splitting or Grassing. Whatever it was called, we didn’t do it.

You're a bum, Rock. You're a bum.

Parents were different though – you could tell them and they’d tell you what to do. I’d seen it on Happy Days, so I knew it was the right thing to do. And so it came to pass that the parental advice Chez Ocelot was as follows: Hit him. Just hit him. Whack him one on the nose. That’ll sort him out. You just have to stand up to bullies. They only get away with this sort of thing because people let them.

Hey, it all sounded good to me. It was true that nobody was standing up to him, and if that was all it took, I was happy to step up the stumps and take a swing. I had my parenty Mickeys in my corner, giving me all the encouragement to sort out my own problems without splitting. The code of the playground would be honoured and the bully would bully no more.

I guess it was the very next day after the parental conflab that my moment came. Since Mark was pretty much giving us all a hard time whenever there were no teachers around, it didn’t take long for him start throwing his weight around. And when it came to my turn, instead of feebly trying to avoid his spitting or elbowing or Chinese burns (I forget) I hit him. Hard. Right on the nose.

Now, if this really was a story with a decent ending and a moral ending, it would then play out like this: the bully stands dazed for a few seconds, then collapses, or runs off, or starts crying. That’s what happens in stories. That’s what happened when George McFly hauled one off at Biff Tannen, and as you know, George’s life was instantly and forever changed for the better by that one single punch, that one act of bravery against a big old bully (this works better if none of us brings up George’s murder in Back To The Future 2, OK? OK).


A questionable role model for bullied youngsters.

This is what actually happened: Mark stood there dazed for about a second. And then hit me back. And hit me again and again. By the time our chemistry teacher came into the room to start the lesson, my head was being repeatedly smashed into the top of a table. I know that because I remember seeing the entire classroom at a strange 90 degree angle as my head bounced up and down. Everyone else looked like they were standing on the wall, which would have been cool in any other circumstances.

Like an idiot, or like a stupid 11-year old kid who’d never been in a real fight before, I’d missed an important vital step in the How To Beat A Bully plan. You have to hit him more than once. People don’t go down after a single punch. Not generally. Not unless you’re Lloyd Honeyghan or Bruce Willis in The Last Boy Scout. It literally had not occurred to me that I might have to do anything more than psych myself up for one single punch. I should’ve sacked my trainers.


What people did to get in shape before
the invention of the WiiFit.

Ultimately, the upshot of my abortive standing-up to the bully had the desired effect, but not exactly in the Hero Of The Beach style that I had imagined. When the chemistry teacher, one Mr Rattigan (known to us variously as Ratty or Zoom, on account of him being fat, like Fat Larry of Fat Larry’s Band. Hey, I didn’t make the nickname up. Blame Martin Baudrey) burst into the classroom to see Mark bouncing my head up and down like a basketball pro, all hell broke loose and the bully was rapidly detained (detention, more like) and subsequently relocated to another class where he might find fewer easy targets for his ill-defined hostility. So the bully was gone. Hooray. Bully for me.

As I said, this was a real incident, not a story. The bully didn’t go down after one punch, I wasn’t hailed as the hero of the class, and my life didn’t change for the better thereafter. Ironically, the lesson I actually learnt was that standing up to bullying fat kids is a good way to get hurt badly. Only in later years did it even dawn on me that the problem was just that I didn’t hit him enough. But that revelation would come years later, long after I’d left school, and far too late to spare me a teenagerhood of dodging bullies when I could have simply given them a taste of their own medicine. Instead of overcoming my swotty cowardice as George had, my own showdown with Biff had actually broke what little nerve I had for standing up to a bully. That’s real life for you.

So is there a moral to this tale? That real life sucks? That everybody had a crap time at school and I should just bloody well get over it? That you shouldn’t believe anything Robert Zemeckis tells you? I wouldn’t like to say. It was a thing that happened and I thought you might find it interesting. Probably nobody else in 1Alpha that day even remembers what happened, apart from myself and maybe Mark, wherever he is. But it had an effect on me and taught me two important lessons: If you don’t stand up to a bully you’ll get your arse kicked. If you stand up to a bully a bit you’ll get your arse kicked a lot.

So just keep hitting the bully until he goes down.



Next week: jokes and japery.

Everything I know about Rochester

Disclaimer: Apologies in advance to all Kentishmen and women of good standing.

Neither a port in Kent nor a 19th century byronic hero

Rochester is in Kent, the Garden of England. It is not to be confused with Rochester in New York state or indeed Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, the eye-rolling stooge of Jack Benny, both of whom are now long deceased. It is situated on the north coast of Kent - the bit that seems to be a tentacle of London formed by God grabbing hold of Woolwich in one big holy fist and squeezing until a stream of housing estates and retail parks squished out like a worm between His fingers.

No, it is actually named after Mr Rochester, the bloke from Jane Eyre or one of them stories. The one who had a mad wife stashed in an upstairs airing cupboard. And then spontaneously combusted all over Mrs Bennet. I think.

The town is on a river that is some sort of tributary of the Thames. The Medway possibly, or the Med. The river squiggles away from the town in a most unseemly fashion, barely making contact at all. Perhaps like Rye, Bruges and ancient Ephesus, the constantly meandering watercourse has deposited silt in such a fashion as to gradually divorce town from river, leaving Rochester looking confused and embarrassed at the altar. The river meanwhile is enthusiastically meandering westward to Gravesend, in a frantic attempt to woo it away from the Thames.

Welcome to Rochester. Grr.

Rochester itself consists of the following landmarks: a bridge, a castle, a cathedral and a high street. The bridge is rather cool and covered in all sorts of heraldry and cast iron lions and such. If it weren't for the newer, unadorned bridge which has been bolted alongside, it would look rather splendid. To get the full effect of the funky heraldic side of the bridge, close one eye when you drive across. Just kidding. No I wasn't.

The castle is rather imaginatively called Rochester Castle. Like most castles I have visited, it is essentially a tall stone box with pigeons roosting inside. All the wooden floors are missing, but there are some nicely drawn visitors' signs dotted about the stone shell depicting what it would've looked like back in the day. Look, I'm all for preserving the past as it now stands and all that, but isn't there perhaps an argument for sticking some of the floors and rooms back in? I mean, it's getting to the point where I don't think I can be bothered to pay out to stand looking up through a yawning roofless stone chimney, trying to picture what it used to look like. I paid my money goddammit - I deserve some floors and walls and draperies and soft furnishing and shields on the walls and long feasting tables surrounded by yapping dogs eating scraps of discarded meat from the straw-covered floor.

90% of the castles you will see in Britain look like this

But no historical re-enactors please. I know it's wrong and cowardly of me, but I instantly clench the moment I round the corner of some historical manor house only to be confronted by an actor in a big floppy white smock and a funny hat, who wants to talk to me about how to grind wheat or press his Lordship's breeches in the correct manner. It's the human interaction I can't manage, I think. Give me a poorly animated dummy and a pre-recorded voiceover any day.

Rochester castle features excitingly perilous stone stairwells, worn smooth and slopey by centuries of plodding feet, first complaining about the unsanitary state of the garderobe and the unjust rule of King John, then later complaining about the lack of floors and how much a postcard in the gift shop costs. The view from the battlements is quite impressive, but only if you look in the direction of the nearby cathedral. Ignore all other views. The non-existent roof has been replaced by a massive net, ostensibly to keep the pigeons from doing what pigeons do in castles. Interestingly, some vandalous scamps have succeeded in lobbing small lumps of stonework onto the net here and there, causing it to sag worryingly in places. Do not be tempted to test if the net can support the weight of a human body. I was, but fortunately Herself pointed out a sign explaining the difference in weight and mass between the average human body and a that of a pigeon. A lucky escape then.

One these is a genuine historical character

The castle's one notable moment in history came in 1215, when rebellious barons were besieged by naughty King John - the one played by the skinny lion in the big crown in the Robin Hood Disney cartoon. History fails to note if Sir Hiss accompanied John at the siege, but I imagine he served as a spy or sapper, undermining the north tower. The siege of Rochester castle is also the subject of the recent Hollywood swordfest Ironclad, which is not about a Victorian steamship as I had assumed. Surely they could have come up with a better name than that. Bloodcastle perhaps. I haven't seen the film yet so I couldn't say, but watch this space.

I do know though that it stars James Purefoy and Jason 'Hey, it's that bloke' Flemyng, so we're not exactly talking Troy or Braveheart here in terms of star power. Even so, I think the castle management has missed a trick by not sticking some footage or posters of the movie up here and there; at least the film shows the castle with floors and other wooden bits. Fools. When I visited Trim castle in County Meath, their gift shop had shedloads of pictures from Braveheart stuck up on the walls, so you had a really good feel for what the castle used to look like (via the imagination of Hollywood set builders). There was even a picture of Mel Gibson having a fag. Brilliant.

Moving on from the castle, we enter the cathedral, imaginatively called Rochester cathedral.  Unlike the tour of the castle, which largely consists of clambering up and down stairs, the cathedral experience is entirely a horizontal one. No sniggering at the back. Your first question when entering any large church is in which direction should you walk - straight up the middle (the nave) or along one side (the septerns), and if so, left or right? By the way, I don't know the correct names of all the parts of a cathedral, so I'm making some of them up. See if you can spot which.

For my part, I like to adopt a 'keep left' policy in the cathedral, which invariably means you start off looking at a load of noticeboards boards about the diocese's good works in the local community and baptising people in Burkina Faso or some such. But once past the modern bulletin boards, you can work your way round the walls of the building. These mainly consist, like most CofE churches, of carved stone memorials to dead people. In Rochester cathedral, many of these dead people appear to be of a military persuasion, doubtless due to the area's naval connection (see later). One such chap is a captain who survived the battles of Balaklava and other 19th century bloodbaths, only to drown while swimming off Malta. Tch.

Check out that enormous organ

Other features of the cathedral include: a large marble carving of a near naked bearded angel with a scythe looking like a vengeful Old Father Time, a massive brass bell commemorating Kent's involvement with the Falklands (I think they dated once) which is almost impossible not to ring (I resisted but only through superhuman willpower), a vast array of organ pipework through one must pass to reach the central transquire, numerous alcoves in the stone walls which infuriatingly lead nowhere, some rather fine velvet padded seating which has been selfishly roped off to keep it from being soiled by the heathen bottoms of the hoi polloi, and most splendidly of all, an emergency bishops' crook in a long glass case. Situated near the prebendial duct, the crook is to be used in cases of dire need, such as a shotgun coronation or vampire apocalypse. I like to think it would fly to the bishop's hand when called, much like Thor's hammer, mighty Mjolnir.

The bishop of Rochester

Two bishops stand out in Rochester's history. One is Odo, a member of William the Conqueror's family, one of those 'hands-on' bishops who got stuck in with the fightin' and the conquerin'. I imagine he got a lot of use out of the emergency crook. He also lived in a bucket. That's OK, nobody got it when I made that joke in the cathedral either. The other notable bishop is Gundulf who built the castle and whose name Sounds Quite Like Gandalf. Believe me, as bishops go, that's pretty bloody fascinating.

So this brings us to the last interesting feature in Rochester - the high street. It is a pretty cobbled street full of pretty shops, and is quite the tourist trap I would imagine, if you weren't visiting on a dull Tuesday afternoon like we were. It has more than its share of tea rooms, book shops, antique dealers and refreshingly non-chain outlets. You'd be hard pressed to find a Starbucks, a Tesco Express or a Nando's here, and the street is all the richer for it.

I would particularly recommend the Tiny Tim's Tea Room, for the splendid decor and complementary tea and coffee refills. Every corner of the walls and ceiling are covered in life-size depictions of Dickens characters, from the eponymous waif himself snivelling in Mrs Cratchet's arms, to Marley's ghost hovering translucently by the kitchen door. It's a work in progress, but jolly splendid nonetheless.
http://www.localdatasearch.com/rochester/town_centre/cafes_snack_shops_tea_rooms/tiny_tims_tea_rooms-12534916

Mr Tumnus is just round the corner

Also recommended is Baggins, the England's largest second hand bookshop (it says). If you can stand the unique smell of second hand bookshops, this is the place for you. It's rambling, exceedingly well stocked and massive. Not in a Waterstones / Warehouse 13 sort of way, but in a 'three shops on different levels knocked together and crammed with bookcases and steps and corners and random artwork' sort of way. The place rambles on for miles, up and down floors, and round mysterious, gloomy turns. I honestly expected to end up in Narnia if I went any further back into the recesses of the shop.

They seem to have the world's supply of old Blue Peter annuals and Analog sci-fi mags from the 60s. Herself managed to locate one of those jigsaw puzzles where the image on the box is not what's on the puzzle itself. I managed to resist instinctively scratching myself after inhaling the dusty, musty, papery atmosphere, but my face still felt like it wanted to crawl off my skull, even 10 minutes after leaving the place. Those of a less-allergenic nature will love it though.

The remainder of the high street is a pleasant mixture of shops offering antiques, books, cakes and knick-knacks. It also boasts (well, I boast on its behalf) the most spacious tourist information centre I've seen in Britain, and a smattering of buildings 'sort of featured in Dickens novels, if you accept that he changed the names'. The town is all about Dickens. He lived here, he ate there, Edwin Drood was murdered over there (by persons unknown). But unfortunately we managed to cleverly time our visit so that every one of these historical buildings was closed by the time we got there. I guess dull Tuesday afternoons just aren't peak visiting time for the Guildhall museum, Restoration House or the Six Poor Travellers house (which I hope is something masonic). Ah well.

As worn by the baddies

Worth a quick peek is the Rochester Armoury shop just off the high street, if only for the amazing amount of Do Not Touch signs covering every item of weaponry and armour. Honestly, it would be easier to just put up one sign next to one designated object, maybe the 'gladiator' helmet, which says 'Hey, touch this one! Knock yourself out!'. Nip in there in there and see if you can find the Nazi fez. Yes, there are Nazi fezzes. With skulls on.

You should also spare a couple of minutes to press your nose against the window of a gift shop which stocks an alarmingly large array of small porcelain figurines of humanoid dogs. Dogs as policemen, dogs as soldiers (Victorian and modern), dogs in every conceivable human uniform. Tellingly, the dogs are largely of the bulldog or bull terrier breed , which I think indicates the sort of people they are aimed at.

Insert music from Deliverance here

There's also a massive cutaway bronzed bust of an English bull terrier, which again appeals to certain people. An English bull terrier for God's sake. I mean, I don't want to come across all breedist or something, but your EBT is not the handsomest of dogs. They look like they're trying to evolve into crocodiles. If dogs could play musical instruments, and by jingo I wish they could, then your English bull terrier would be strumming a banjo on his porch, rocking back and forth on an old chair, giving you an inscrutable look from those weird eyes inching up the sides of his misshapen head. Anyway, I preferred the porcelain models of Desperate Dan and the Bash Street Kids.

Finally, do have a look out for Restoration House and Abdication House, where Charles II spent his first night as king and James II his last respectively. Or it could have been the other way round. Damn those unimaginatively named Stuarts and their throne-hopping antics. Why they both chose Rochester for their ultimate/inaugural stopovers I cannot say. Perhaps it was England's Ellis Island, a natural embarkation point for incoming and outgoing monarchs. Or maybe the Stuarts had gold card membership and wanted to make use of the premier class passengers' lounge on their way to and from exile. Who can say? Only historians or anybody with access to Wikipedia and I am far too antisocial and lazy to enquire of either.

So there you have Rochester. That's everything I know about it. All the nice things. Off you go now.



Still here? I've said everything nice. If you hang around any longer you'll hear horrid things. Be warned. Oookay...

So, the high street. It's lovely and charming and historical and not too touristy (honest). I've got no problem with the high street itself. Not the buildings or the trees or the service in the shops or the price of the victoria sponge cake. No. I did find my fellow passers-by a bit of a disappointment though. They're a bit chavvy. Actually they're a lot chavvy.

Never have I beheld a more incongruous mass of slouching, shuffling, grunting citizens then I did on Rochester high street. They looked so out of place. A Quality Street scene populated with extras from a 'Britain's sink estates' docudrama, like someone in central casting had got their schedules mixed up. Actually, I think they must have been lost. Certainly you could vaguely detect a glimmer of confusion or dislocation behind those dull hollow eyes, as they dragged their corpulent carcasses up and down the street, wondering where the KFC and JJB outlets were. I have never seen so many tattooed calves jutting from so many overlong pairs of shorts as I did that day.

The good folk of Chatham scent fresh kebab

Remember the rubbish bit (OK, one of the rubbish bits) from The Lord of the Rings, when the hobbits go back to the Shire and it's been taken over by Saruman and it's all depressing and scummy? Imagine he'd brought along a bunch of orcs and goblins, who proceed to loaf about Hobbiton scratching their snouts and snuffling around. That's what it's like - they just don't fit in. Yes, yes, I know this sounds all very nimbyish, but it's not My Back Yard, so I'm allowed. Surely.

I can only assume this itinerant mass must have slouched roughly in from elsewhere. Surely the good folk of Rochester would not abide such tourist-repelling chavvery to reside within their own borders. Perhaps they stumble mindlessly across the bridge from humble Strood or else wander along the banks of the river from neighbouring Chatham. Possibly they come to Rochester to die in the manner of old elephants, to witness a slice of lovely, creamy old England before their arteries finally and fatally clog up with kebabs and piercings. Maybe Rochester is where they come to spawn, for spawn they most assuredly do, as we were to learn from our brief but illuminating mission further afield...

Like African explorers seeking out the source of the Nile, we left Rochester and traced the source of the chavstream back to Chatham. This proved to be most educational. Chatham, you should understand, is the Shelbyville to Rochester's Springfield. The Blob Street to its Bash Street. Actually, that should be the other way around. Rochester is definitely the aspirational, slightly snobby one in this relationship. Chatham the poor, down at heels cousin, consisting of three standout urban locations: an imposing military base hidden behind barbed wire-topped brick walls, an historic naval dockyard visible from the road only as a series of looming wooden boathouses, and a generic leisure/retail park.

Bricks, barbed wire, rusting boats and a Pizza Hut. No wonder the locals have nothing better to do than eat, reproduce and get themselves inked so they can tell themselves apart when they get confused. Never have I seen so many young people and toddlers than in Chatham, and so few elderly. We did see one ageing couple, bedecked in the standard beige garb of the oldster, frailly standing bemused at the entrance to an eatery, wondering where all the other senior citizens had gone. I suspect they were the last two left, the others having all been picked off by the spawning mass of youth around them, like the cubs in Logan's Run (look it up).

A nobly named vessel

In its defence, I will say that Chatham's multiplex cinema sports a massive external screen showing trailers, so you can sit in your vehicle in the car park and pretend to be at a drive-in. Watching very short films. Not only that, but the historic dockyard is the last resting place of a certain submarine, HMS Ocelot. And that is one of the few things in this article that I haven't made up.

Next week: everything I know about Belgium.