Becky Fury, a compassion glut in the Calais migrant jungle and a new award

Becky with her Cunning Stunt Award at the Edinburgh Fringe

At the Edinburgh Fringe this year, comedian Becky Fury won the Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award. But, then, a couple of weeks ago, she got another award.

Last night, she told me: “I did a gig at the Deptford Bird’s Nest which, I believe, was Malcolm Hardee’s old stomping ground.”

“Never heard of it,” I told her.

“And I arrived,” Becky continued, ignoring me, “and I was greeted with another Malcolm Hardee Award. French Fred and Karen decided…”

“Karen?” I asked.

“Was she not one of Malcolm Hardee’s acolytes?”

“She’s a woman,” I said, “so that will almost certainly be a Yes.”

“A woman in South London…” added Becky.

“So almost family,” I said.

“Anyway,” said Becky, “Karen and French Fred greeted me with what is apparently the REAL Malcolm Hardee Award.”

“Which is?” I asked.

Becky Fury with her ‘new’ competing Malcolm Hardee award

“A framed photo of him. They told me your Malcolm Hardee Awards are just pretenders.”

“They knew you had won the Edinburgh Award?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Because it is so increasingly prestigious,” I suggested.

“Precisely,” Becky confirmed.

“Where have you hung this picture of him?” I asked.

“Well, I had to give it back to them…”

“What?”

“French Fred wanted it back to put in his bedroom,” explained Becky.

“I have a photo of Nicholas Parsons in my bedroom,” I told her.

She just looked at me and said nothing.

The organised Anarchist Bookfair cabaret

Becky is organising the cabaret part of the Anarchist Bookfair tomorrow.

“I heard,” I told her, “that some people who organised it in previous years were too disorganised for the anarchists.”

Becky looked at me and raised a Roger Moore style eyebrow.

“We are raising money for the ongoing support of people stuck in Calais,” she said.

“Ah,” I said, “you went to the migrant ‘jungle’ in Calais this week, before it got demolished. Why?”

“Because it was interesting. And because a lot of people I know have gone and helped. And a friend of mine was driving there with some stuff. And I’m basically writing stuff for my new show.”

Becky Fury by the Hitler bunker with a friend from the jungle

“Which is about…?”

“I dunno if I want to say. But I actually got an amazing story by going there and actually finding out what was going on in the jungle itself.”

“Your friend,” I prompted, “was driving there with stuff. What stuff?”

“Donations. Tents,” said Becky. “Tins of kidney beans. That sort of thing. Also a friend of mine ran the warehouse there. He used to have a sound system – Bedlam Sound System – and he sold it to set up the warehouse.”

“The jungle had a warehouse?” I asked.

Helpers hard at work in one of the Calais jungle’s warehouses

“Two warehouses. I worked in the one that was set up by the sound system squatter collective. I went for four days. I got a lift and I nearly didn’t stay, because the people who gave me a lift were all going to go off and do a squat party in Amsterdam.”

“What was the warehouse like?”

“It was a really unbelievably lovely experience.”

“Because?”

“It was like a distribution point for random acts of kindness. Everyone was there because they wanted to be helpful. It had a really good sense of community.

“I helped in the warehouse for three days but I wanted to go to the jungle and another lift turned up – a guy from London who I knew from years ago. A very rich man. He turned up with his World Music Covers choir. For some reason, he thought that was what people in the jungle really needed. Not tins of kidney beans, not tents, but some white man singing Bob Marley covers at them.”

“Can I write that?” I asked. “You’re putting him down a bit.”

“That’s OK,” said Becky. “Because he left me there. He left me in the jungle. So I think it’s fair enough to slag him off. This is going in my show as well.”

“So,” I said. “World music in the jungle…”

Some of the British newspaper headlines about the migrants

“I was listening to it in the warehouse,” explained Becky, “and thinking: This is really beautiful, very accomplished. But also very white. And there was some level of cultural appropriation. They also did covers from The Lion King… As if these people had not suffered enough!

“I was thinking about all those newspaper stories about rape gangs and aggressive men and thinking: God, we are going to go and serenade them with Bob Marley covers. If they don’t kill us, they should.”

“And the reaction was?” I asked.

“A polite smattering of applause.”

“How many people were watching?”

“About 50.”

“Of the 7,000 to 10,000 in the jungle…” I mused.

“Basically,” explained Becky, “some of them couldn’t get away from us because it was set up near the queue for the food. There was no escape. And we also turned up in the Sudanese community where they were all drinking tea and one of the guys there was wearing sportswear with a pair of Nikes and a branded hoodie, looked at this posh white man with an acoustic guitar and asked: Are we gonna make party? Sarcastically.

“This guy who organised it was, I think, trying to impress me with his world music choirs covers band but I had really gone there to find out more information about the place and I started chatting to a guy from Peckham. He had come from Afghanistan when he was 12.”

“So he had suffered,” I said. “First Afghanistan, then Peckham.”

“Yeah. So that’s his home. Peckham. But we (the British) refused to give him a visa so he ended up in the jungle in Calais. He told me: I have fantasies about being stuck on the Central Line. He’s basically a Londoner. He speaks perfect English and even had a South London  twang. But he was stuck in Calais.

Becky thought: “As if these people had not suffered enough!”

“In Calais, there was a glut of compassion. People in the West don’t have the opportunity to be kind and to be compassionate often enough. In a Buddhist country, you’ve got that in your culture. It’s more engrained. What happened in Calais was basically a glut of compassion where everyone was going there because they wanted to be nice. And all the compassion was re-distributed to all the people coming from all these places having a horrible time, coming to receive that compassion.

“But it caused problems, because the people in Calais didn’t want all those refugees to be in their town because the compassion was not being distributed out properly. If everyone in the West were more compassionate on a day-to-day level, it would be more evenly distributed and everyone would feel better about themselves and you wouldn’t get this compassion clot like in Calais.”

 

Comic Del Strain on Americans, the EU and Nazis on the dark side of the Moon

This penguin is real and is not a spider

I rarely remember my dreams but, this morning, I remember I dreamt I threw something on the floor and out of it came a brown spider. A big one.

“It’s too big,” I told someone,” to put a glass over it. And then I realised it really was too big – vertically – because it was white and black with orange-yellow feet or flippers, because it was a penguin. But it was not smooth and slimy as, I suspect, penguins actually are. Instead it seemed to have a slightly ruffled and wrinkled cotton skin as if it was made from cotton and was maybe one size too big for it.

That was in the early hours of this morning.

This afternoon, I had tea with Scots comic Del Strain at Soho Theatre. The very first thing he said to me, rather excitedly, was:

“I’ve got a new gun!”

“Is it legal?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Del. “It’s a new stage prop. I treated myself.”

“Most people who want to treat themselves,” I suggested, “might have a tea and fairy cake or something like that.”

“This is a sight to behold,” said Del. “It’s a Smith & Wesson but it’s too heavy to go down the back of my strides; I think I will have to buy a shoulder holster.”

“How can this possibly be legal?” I asked.

“I dunno,” said Del. “Ask the man in Newcastle who sold me it… It’s one of these old shops you go in and…”

“Is this genuinely legal?” I asked. “Can I mention it in my blog?”

Del Strain at home with his new Smith & Wesson purchase

“YES!” insisted Del. “I’ve got a receipt and everything. This shop does everything: replicas, gas-fired guns. It’s legal. If I was in the foyer of Barclays Bank with a mask made out of a pair of someone’s old stockings, I would be in a lot of trouble.but, as I’m on stage…”

“How do you carry this around?” I asked.

“In my bag,” said Del. “The old gun I’ve got was enough to get you shot, believe you me, but this one would REALLY get you shot.”

“By whom?” I asked.

“Armed police, who are nervous and who seem to shoot poor black guys for just having a diary in their pocket. They’re getting a bit trigger-happy on this side of the pond too, John. But I bought it for a prop. See, rich people have got TESSAs and pensions and shit but, the way this country’s going, I’ve got this.”

”I think,” I said, “when John Wilkes Booth went to the theatre he may have claimed it was only a prop.”

“Well,” said Del, “maybe that bullet DID kill Lincoln – or maybe the people that were ready to send Andrew Johnson in to rape the South and kill all the Indians and steal the gold killed him. Who knows? History is a wonderful thing when it’s written by the victors.”

“But,” I asked, “surely politicians would not lie to us?”

“I don’t trust none of them,” said Del. “Brown, Blair, Cameron, Osborne – all playing the flute of Rothschild and the EU bankers. They’re never going to change nothing, because they’re all greedy madmen and they’re going to end up leading us all to the brink of destruction. They’re raping London; they’re ripping the soul out of it – all to build these ghettos in the sky where no-one can hear you scream. It’s ridiculous. They’re taking out the salt of the earth that made London what it was, because people can’t afford to live here no more.”

“Is Scotland going to be the People’s Paradise?” I asked.

“Yeah, well,” said Del, “I don’t know about that. It depends if we’ve got some undercover oil that we haven’t declared, which is what I hear.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah. Apparently the Yanks are in on it. The Norwegians. Just rubbing their hands in glee, waiting. So who knows?”

“Until Apple brings out an electric car,” I mused. “But, then, plastics need oil in the manufacturing process, don’t they?”

“Yeah,” said Del, “but it’s that synthetic oil that I think the Nazis started inventing in World War Two. When they couldn’t get any oil, they invented synthetics in drugs and oils and everything else.”

“When you live on the dark side of the Moon,” I said, “you can develop all these things. Have you seen Iron Sky?”

Iron Sky from the dark side of the Moon

“No. Is it about Nazis on the Moon? I don’t even think the Americans went to the Moon.”

“Surely,” I suggested, “the Russians would have known if the Americans did not get to the Moon and would have told everyone?”

“The Russians,” said Del, “are quoted as saying to the Americans: If you don’t tell people about the aliens, we are going to. The Russians are quoted as saying that Eisenhower met these people in 1947 and the American newspapers from the time are actually quite open about the fact of there being aliens.

“You don’t know what to believe, because these people propagate and manipulate history so much that it’s like archaeologists putting dirt through a sieve to find what is real, because there’s just so much rubbish out there. All I know is that these people have been running the show since the Battle of Waterloo.”

“Iron Sky,” I explained, “starts from the supposition that, In 1945, some Nazis escaped to the dark side of the Moon and Now they’re back!”

“There is a swastika up there on the Moon,” Del told me. “Someone took a picture of it and there is a swastika on the Moon. No shit. The guy who was in charge of all the Nazi’s specialist weapons, his body was never found. He disappeared. The bell that they had – which was a little mini flying saucer – was taken to America. They were on it. The Nazis had been building these superstructures in South America. Some people say that it wasn’t even Hitler that died – that he lived out his days there.”

“Can I quote all this?” I asked.

“If you want,” said Del. “Some people say that. I am not saying it is a fact, but what I’m saying is, considering some of the shit these people have pulled – the deaths of Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, Bob Marley… Bob Marley gets cancer through playing football but no football player has ever had that injury? Come on! When people get too vocal, when people listen to them, you become a danger and who knows? Who knows if it was his body? I hope it was his body. I think they dug him up in he 1990s and said it definitively was.”

“Who?” I asked.

Del Strain showing his sincerity at Soho Theatre earlier today

“Hitler,” laughed Del. “Not Bob Marley. I’m not definitively saying that. I’m only surmising. But Hitler still has living relatives in America. They changed their name.”

“I suppose they would,” I said.

“The CIA,” Del continued, “took them all over there as well as the 90 Nazi scientists who were the ones who invented the Moon landings and Apollo 11 and all that. If you look at The Odessa File, that was based on a true story. Within four or five years, they all slipped right back into their old roles running the courts, the police system, running everything.”

“In Germany?” I asked

“In Germany, yes. I see the EU flag as a swastika. I see it as a sign of oppression. They are doing now with a pen and economics and banks what they used to do with Panzer tanks and MP40s. It’s still the same terror. It’s still the same control. It’s still the same dictating.

“You cannot make Barnsley like Barcelona at 4.00am on a Saturday night. Barnsley will never be Barcelona because, in Barcelona, they’re sitting and talking about Gaudi and architecture and philosophy and drinking Stella Artois. In Barnsley, they’re fucking each other over skips, eating kebabs, drunk that much that they’re lying on the fucking road. That is Britain. You can’t change that. It is everything that made this country strong.

“You go from Lancashire to Yorkshire to Scouse – 28 miles and we’ve got our own slang, our own foods, our own people. That is everything that made Britain Britain. We are an island nation. We need that. But they want us all to be a bland little revenue gerbil, just spinning on the wheel for some feed and some water.”