My Shit Life So Far (19 page)

I hated being at the birth, having always found hospitals creepy. Luckily my daughter’s mum had to have quite a lot of
drugs so I nipped out for a couple of hours in the middle and watched a football match without her realising.

Childbirth is many things, but it is not sexy. Even though I once turned the volume down and masturbated to a birth on the Open University. For one thing, there’s the stretchmarks. Your partner’s beautiful, alabaster stomach will end up looking like a school desk in a remedial class.

That said, I’ve always had a grim fascination with horrible medical stuff. Earlier this year an Australian doctor performed brain surgery on a 13-year-old boy with a household power drill. He said the trickiest part of the operation was attaching the mahogany book shelves. And did you see that an American woman called Connie had a face transplant? Apparently the surgeon used to work on
Bo’ Selecta!
Obviously this transplant makes Connie happy, but somewhere a sumo wrestler’s wife is grieving. Connie says this face transplant means she ‘can blend into the crowd’. She’s moving to Scotland?

I think nowadays I’d be worried about the whole MRSA thing. A man who committed suicide was found in a locked hospital toilet where he had lain for three days. A source at the hospital said, ‘It makes you wonder what the cleaners were doing.’ Have you seen the state of the toilets in a hospital? He probably was the cleaner. Any cleaner that found him would just have stuck a Pine Fresh toilet block in his mouth and a toilet roll on his dick.

Live Floor Show
was given a network series, but the producer dropped me, replacing me with a good-looking black guy. I don’t blame the producer for this; he had a good reason. He knew fuckall about comedy. Jim and Craig were still on the show though, so I got a job writing for both of them. It was good to be out of performing for a bit and a relief to think of ideas without having to worry about how you were going to sell them. In fact, you had the amusement of watching other people worry about it.

I had a little more time on my hands, so I taught myself to swim. None of your fancy lessons either; with sheer will-power I had developed my own powerful idiosyncratic style. It had the added benefit of encouraging people in the pool to avoid me. Now that I had some time off performing I just swam all the time. Scotland’s municipal pools have an every-man-for-himself atmosphere, like the D-Day landings in Speedos. I toured the pools, swimming almost everywhere in Glasgow. There was one in Giffnock where everybody was so old it was like a scene from
Cocoon
. I tried the pool in Clydebank on a day where everybody was mentally impaired. I couldn’t work out if this was a special day or just what people are like in Clydebank.

There was a pool near my house where they’d pack them in like the ending of
Titanic
. It had a truly mental sauna where
people would sell knock-off DVDs, eat oranges, shave and exchange spirited abuse. I once heard two brothers musing on where their pitbull saw them in the pack pecking order.

‘My auld man thinks he’s number wan! The dog humps his leg—he canny be number wan! Ahm number wan!’

Trust me, if you’re worrying about where you are in your dog’s preferences, the dog is number one.

There was an older guy, a muscular tattooed maniac who’d come in a lot. One night somebody said to him:

‘Hey Jamesy! I hear you were playing Davie’s lot at five-aside the other night. How’d you get on?’

‘How did I get on?’ roared Jamesy. ‘Ah punched him and ah punched his brother!’

I joined a posh sauna in the West End but it was boring; lawyers talking about their tax bills and mortgages. Nobody had ever punched anybody and his brother. I’m still at a private gym, which I feel a bit bad about. On the other hand, I just couldn’t take the shiteness of the municipal places anymore. I was always greeted by some world-weary poster boy for autism, staring blankly over my shoulder as he told me I couldn’t swim because it was women’s day, or because it was Tuesday, or because everything was broken. In my new gym they’ve trained someone attractive to tell me that everything is broken with a smile.

Learning to swim obviously did nothing to improve my fitness. I did a radio series that was a travelogue of the West Highland Way. There were five or six of us presenting it, including wee Sandy Nelson, walking the 95 miles between Glasgow and Fort
William. None of us made it. It started off as a daytime show, as it was supposed to be a cheery travel piece, but once the gruelling catalogue of failure was edited it got renamed
Fear and Loathing on the West Highland Way
and put out at midnight.

My angle was to go without doing any preparation and to not take any stuff. I literally didn’t even bring a coat. Jimmy McGregor, the Scottish celebrity walker, turned up to see us off and do a wee interview when we started in Milngavie. It says a lot about Scotland that we have a celebrity walker, and he was horrified at my approach. He was stunned that I was just leaving with the clothes I had on me and a Mars bar. I would find stuff along the way, making it more of an adventure, I assured him.

I did find stuff. We tried to walk it in five days and I found a pair of rubber overtrousers someone had left on a hedge, a hat and gloves. It was like being one of the Wombles. Or a tramp. None of us had any experience of that kind of walking and after the first day we all moaned like fuck. After two days a couple of the presenters started hitching. Myself and Sandy kept going. On day three we felt pretty good and ran a big downhill section. It was incredibly exhilarating bouncing from rock to rock, wondering if you could actually stop. On day four I realised that I had wrecked my knee doing that. I tried to do the last day limping up the final hilly bit but some irate outdoor types told me I was in no fit state and politely told me to fuck off from their mountain. I got a bus back to Glasgow, failing miserably at a physical challenge regularly completed by the elderly, fat Americans and the terminally ill.

Fresh from the failure of the walk, I hit on another plan—this time to visit bothies and connect with the real Scotland for a Hunter S. Thompson-esque column I was writing for a Scottish newspaper. But this came off the rails in a spectacular fashion. The first stop was Cumbernauld. Cumbernauld was once described as the ‘most dismal’ town in the whole of Scotland. Whoever thinks Cumbernauld is the most dismal town in Scotland obviously hasn’t travelled around much. Cumbernauld is the most dismal town in the whole of the world. Next stop was Inverary, but we couldn’t find the bothy we’d planned to stay in and then couldn’t get a room at the hotel. Maybe they were genuinely full on a Monday night, or maybe it was the fact that I looked like I’d just been dragged off the bottom of a riverbed. We ploughed on to Oban. On a Monday, it has the overall atmosphere of a tramp’s funeral. We went into an old-man’s pub in the centre, put a lot of Barry Manilow and reggae on the jukebox, and danced incongruously in a bar cramped with dour-faced hillwalkers. There’s something in the way we all bend our necks to capitalism that meant, just because I had put a pound in the jukebox, nobody punched me for making them listen to a disco remix of ‘Copacabana’. In a saner world, I would now be lying drowned in a lobster pot.

People always ask why Scottish tourism struggles. Because it’s an amazingly expensive, wet and unfriendly country. For the price of two days in Mull and Oban we could easily have had a week in Spain. Maybe Spanish people are unfriendly too—I don’t know because I can’t understand a word they’re saying.
That said, small businesses in Scotland have apparently been far less affected by the recession than firms in England and Wales, thus proving, whatever the climate, there will always be an American willing to pay for a document proving that the surname Goldberg really has a clan tartan.

Later we went and sat in the cathedral. We thought it was totally empty until we worked out that there was a priest sitting in a wee wooden box, waiting for people to come in and confess to stuff. The whole thing gave me an enormous sexual thrill. I wish I’d had the guts to go in and confess that to him. The next day, I ran into a guy who—over the course of a rambling chat—offered to do some design stuff for posters I needed for a festival I was doing. Nice fella. It only occurred to me on the way home that he was clearly gay and had been hitting on me. I pulled the email address he had given me out of my pocket. I don’t know that I’ll be getting in touch with [email protected].

One thing I did learn from the trip was that there seems to be a conspiracy not to mention the fact that Scotland is a rubbish place to have a holiday. Glasgow has a ‘tour bus’ that has so little to show people it seems to spend about ten minutes on the motorway. That’s got to be a challenge for the guide to keep talking.

‘And if you look to your right just now you should be able to see…a Renault Clio. And if you look very carefully out your lefthand window, you should see…your own reflection in the glass.’

I can understand why we’d talk it up to gullible tourists (to poochle their foreign money), but why should we lie to each
other? The only way a campaign to persuade Scots to holiday in Scotland could be successful would be if it had the slogan ‘Visit Scotland…Spain’s been hit by a nuclear bomb.’

Desperate to escape and have a proper holiday, I went to see Celtic in the UEFA Cup Final in Seville. It was bonkers. The whole city just partying fans, with the locals having wisely fled into the hills. Seville was beautiful and I had a great time. I couldn’t book a hotel room anywhere but just wandered into a five-star hotel somewhere and slept in a little roofless garden, curled up round the base of a big cactus with the stars up above me.

The drinking really shocked me though, and so did the physical condition of the fans. Everyone was waddling about in XXL Celtic tops. There were guys who looked like they’d just stuck their head out of the top of a duvet cover. I was standing on a corner talking to some forty-somethings and made a joke about the A-Team and nobody knew what I was talking about. They were too young. These were guys in their early twenties and they looked like they were dying under a witch’s curse.

It really brought it home to me that we are an alcoholic country. Perhaps some friendly nation will one day make an intervention, invade us and police our streets with a UN Gripekeeping Force. I sometimes wonder what we could achieve as a country if we just gave up the drugs and booze. Look at all the stuff we invented in the past: TV; tarmacadam; capitalism; and, according to a drunk I met at a party, Motown. England came up with nothing. They were too busy working on the copyright and patenting system.

I think our nation’s health problems are partly down to the massive inequality in Scotland. I read a report recently that showed the regions in Glasgow with the highest and lowest life expectancies are separated by just a few miles. One area sees people living well into their 80s, while the other has a life expectancy of 57, lower than Iraq. I don’t think Scots particularly mind having a lower life expectancy than Iraq; it’s the lower standard of football that really grates. After all, if you live here you’ll know that 57 years feels like plenty. Glasgow’s Lord Provost was said to be slightly surprised by the news, causing him to have a massive heart attack. A report like that could be a chance for Scotland to change its ways. But it won’t. I’d be surprised if it hasn’t already been used as roach paper. We will take this report on board as the average Scottish male takes advice from his doctor, with a pinch of salt—and a dab of speed. Maybe some Valium if he can score off the doctor.

Later that year, Jim and I were signed up to do a show at the Edinburgh Festival. We’d both have much rather donated our stillattached balls to medical science. We’d now done loads of telly in Scotland, but knew there was still no way we’d be able to attract an audience from the sort of cunts who go to the festival. We went through a brief, drug-fuelled period of wanting to do it as two nightmarish golf buddies, sort of like an evil Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. We’d go to a driving range stoned and write gags about the movies these guys had done together. It really
made me laugh. We did a couple of previews and nobody knew what the fuck we were talking about, so it was back to stand-up.

I’d known for a while I’d be doing that year’s Edinburgh Festival after a dream I’d had. I dreamt that I was drowning in an ocean of burning shit and I knew what it meant. I’ve since asked my agent who makes all the money at the Fringe. She showed me a photograph of a spaceship half-buried in a quarry and I never asked again.

Edinburgh is a giant tourist trap. It’s really a collection of kilt shops with a bus network. Everyone there either works in banking or sells Arran sweaters; now even the RBS HQ is just a gift shop selling musical sporrans. The recent economic collapse has hit the city hard. Edinburgh was miserable during the boom years—with the collapse of the banks it’s become like a Leonard Cohen song with planning permission.

When the festival arrives so does the Fringe. The festival regards the Fringe like a dog turd it just can’t shake off its wingtipped brogues. They know while they’re attending the premier of
The Cherry Orchard
in Swahili thousands are watching a man shitting light bulbs on the Royal Mile for free, and having much more fun. Comedy at the Fringe used to be a fun pick’n’mix. You could watch stand-up in an abandoned church for under a fiver. Now it’s a massive corporate bumfest. Edinburgh Council charges so much for venues, most comedians have to wear ‘Golf Sale’ signs during gigs to break even. Money and sponsorship ruin everything. Before long some comedians will do their show from inside a giant KFC bucket on the roof of a rotating Mazda
coupÉ. They’re already talking about a ‘Fringe Fringe’. Good.

Then we can get back to watching Norwegian improv in a derelict foot clinic.

Remember to cherish your homegrown Scottish performers at the Fringe. They lead briefer, unhappier lives than other comics but burn all the brighter for it, like a mayfly or a jobby in a bonfire. It’s also good to see Glaswegian punters at the Fringe. With the world’s biggest arts festival just round the corner, it must be difficult to tear yourself away from murdering a neighbour in a dispute about a satellite dish. For a lot of Glaswegians, going to the Edinburgh Fringe is like visiting the snobbiest person you know while they’re hosting a dinner party for a troupe of contemporary dancers. So well done to all the Scottish people who travel there to the festival; you are still the only people in the world who are watching opera drunk.

Edinburgh is full of mainly white, middle-class Presbyterians. I suppose if you’re told every Sunday that laughter is the sound of Satan farting then you’re not really going to be a bundle of laughs. I was thrown out of Edinburgh’s City CafÉ for having my friend’s children with me. Despite being a supposedly cosmopolitan bar in the centre of the world’s biggest arts festival, they simply don’t want to have children in their establishment. This is not unusual in Scotland—publicans are generally worried that the sound of children’s laughter will remind their customers that there is a world outside grim-faced drinking. It also comes from a deeply ingrained sexism—children should be at home with their mums, men should be in the pubs drinking in peace. If
you’re going by the City CafÉ, why not pop in and tell them what you think if you’re a parent. Or even better, a dangerously paranoid schizophrenic. Listen carefully. I think that’s God telling you to go and have a word.

Being in a show that’s going badly often brings it home how little other people really know about what you’re doing. Because something’s going badly, people will sometimes feel a bit freer about offering you their advice. We had a meeting with Jim’s agent after one performance and he told us that ‘the opening jokes didn’t go great. Perhaps you needed to write some stronger stuff for the top.’ Those are our best jokes, we told him, they just aren’t working here. ‘Is what you’re saying,’ asked Jim, ‘that the show would be better if we wrote some more jokes that were better than our best jokes?’ The guy beamed, glad to have got his message across.