Far away from topless Kate Middleton, critic Kate Copstick’s shock pregnancy…

The big story in British newspapers

The big story in British newspapers for the last couple of days has been the French magazine (and now the Irish newspaper) publishing topless photos of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge.

I blogged yesterday about a very enjoyable visit to the Pull The Other One comedy club and about the origin of the word ‘Wally’.

Meanwhile, in the real world, a couple of days ago, nine men were found hanging from a bridge in Mexico and the Syrian civil war continues, mostly unreported.

Doyenne of British comedy critics Kate Copstick, meanwhile, is currently in Kenya, where she spends four months every year and where her Mama Biashara charity aims to help poor women start up self-sustaining businesses.

These are a couple of extracts from her diary.

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Kate Copstick: story of an unexpected pregnancy in Kenya

Saturday

The small market is in full swing and I learn from one of the woman that my friend Janet has been taken to Kisii because she was having complications with a pregnancy I had no idea she was having (the last two ended in miscarriage) and she couldn’t afford the medical fees in Nairobi. I get a number and call Janet. She doesn’t sound good.

The baby is too big, she says. Coming from Janet – a woman who would have given Rubens himself pause for thought – that is quite something. The baby is backwards, she says. As it is unborn, I assume this refers to position in the womb, not IQ. The doctors say it might die, she says.  I say I will try to get to Kisii but I do not have much time.

Doris is only an hour and a half late (“because of jam”) but gives great feedback on the women Mama Biashara medicated and financed last time out. Pretty much all good! The ladies with the pus-ridden gums are all sorted, the man with the infected leg is still one of the Great Unwashed but healed up, some businesses are really flourishing, some are opening second branches, some rice sellers are finding out our warnings about low profit margins are true and tweaking their business to increase income.

The least successful workshop seems to have been the one where God was called upon to strike me down. (Previously blogged about here)

Businesses are going on but there is no massive expansion.

Still, the women have income.

Doris comes back to my little house and we sort through the medication I have – an eclectic mix, thanks to Zetta making almost nightly raids on her friends’ medicine chests.

The first clinic and workshop is fixed for Monday in Limuru.

How do people sleep on plastic sheeting ? I slide all over my mattress and the sheet just slips off into a ball in the corner. I feel like wetting myself just so I can enjoy the benefits of the thing, rather than the drawbacks. But I don’t.

Monday

We are guided to the dying boy by a woman up a tree on top of a hill shouting things like “I can see you!” and “You have gone too far!” down Felista’s phone. At one point, Felista gets out of the car and walks in front, taking instructions from the woman in the tree on the hill. We crawl along behind, like the first cars driving behind a man with a red flag.

When we get there, it is to find a woman who looks like a twiglet in a hat lying on an old mattress in a mud hut and a boy sitting outside. His face looks hamster-like. He is listless. Probably neither is being helped to health by not having eaten in days.

I head off back down the hill to get food, charcoal and anything else useful the settlement shops might have. Bones for soup as it turns out.

Joseph, the boy, is being ‘looked after’ by a group calling themselves the DREAM Foundation.

The Sisters of Charity of St Vincent get huge amounts of money to identify positive children ‘at risk’ in the community and place them in homes, monitor them, give them food and make sure they are getting the right medication.

This translates – in the real world – into They find children who are positive, take them to a home and dump them there. The kids have to come to the DREAM centre for monitoring (a round trip of at least half a day, costs to be borne by Felista), seem to have doctors who trained under Dr Mengele on the staff (or didn’t train at all), hand out a couple of kgs of gruel flour and a bag of sugar each month to each kid as ‘nutritional support’ and then, if the child stops responding to the very basic medication they offer (two lines of antiretroviral drugs and little else), they send them away to any relative they can find to die, as dying in a DREAM approved home would look bad on the statistics.

Joseph has stopped responding to the second line of antiretroviral drugs, hence he has been sent to die in a mud hut on a hill with an ancient twiglet as his carer.

One man can change the world with a bullet (or six) in the right place….

(A version of this blog was also published in the Huffington Post under the title What Links Dead Comedian Malcolm Hardee, Gangster Mad Frank Fraser & a British Political Sex Scandal?)

My local handyman (who is a very interesting person; he was at university – UCL, London – with the mother of Kate Middleton, our possibly future Queen) came round to mend my side gate yesterday. He was telling me he hated reading Charles Dickens and could not understand what people see in Dickens’ writing.

“Just caricatures,” he fumed. “Just caricatures. But,” he continued, “Horace Walpole is worse. “The Castle of Otranto is utter shit yet people thought it was a great piece of writing at the time and they thought Horace Walpole’s name would be remembered. Now, quite rightly, no-one remembers him except dusty academics. He’s a footnote. Who knows which ‘famous’ people’s names are going to survive from the 20th century? It’s pot luck.”

Also yesterday, Bill Alford sent me a Facebook message telling me he had posted on Flickr ninety-five… count ’em that’s ninety-five… photographs he took in the years 1985-1987 at the late Malcolm Hardee‘s legendary – nay, notorious – seminal alternative comedy club The Tunnel Palladium.

In among the early photos of Keith Allen, Clive Anderson, Phil Cool, Jenny Eclair, Harry Enfield, Jeremy Hardy, Ainsley Harriott, Jools Holland, Eddie Izzard, Phill Jupitus, Josie Lawrence, Neil Morrissey, Mike Myers (yes, that Mike Myers), Vic Reeves, Jerry Sadowitz, Screaming Lord Sutch, Squeeze and many others at Malcolm’s Tunnel Palladium, there is a photo of a trendy-looking gent captioned Johnny Edge.

All ninety-five… count ’em that’s ninety-five… of Bill’s photos are interesting – a nostalgic flashlight on an earlier comedy era – but the photo of Johnny Edge was the one which interested me most because I never met Johnny Edge.

I only knew of him by reputation.

He died almost exactly a year ago, on 26th September 2010.

He was just an ordinary bloke living in south east London, whom most people had never heard of yet, when he died, he merited very lengthy obituaries in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the Independent.

In that sense, he was a bit like Malcolm Hardee.

Most people in Britain had never heard of Malcolm Hardee but, when he drowned in January 2005, such was his importance to the development of British comedy, that he merited near full-page obituaries in the Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard, the Guardian, the Independent and The Times – indeed, he managed to get two obituaries in the Evening Standard and two in the Guardian.

Malcolm had told me tales of Johnny Edge coming to his comedy clubs and, when I showed the Flickr photo to a friend who worked at Malcolm’s later comedy club Up The Creek, she immediately recognised him:

“Oh yes. I recognise him. He was a regular. He always seemed to me to be on his own. I didn’t know who he was, but other people seemed to know him and treat him with respect, like he had been in known bands or something, He looked ‘reggae’ and he held himself well, maybe just because he was older and quiet. He seemed nice. I think if he had been in a rock band I would have heard which one, which is why I wondered how people were familiar with him… Now I come to think about it, maybe Malcolm always put his name ‘on the door’ so he got in for free. Logically, I think that is highly likely.”

When Malcolm had told me about Johnny Edge being a regular at his clubs, I could feel the slight thrill he had in being able to say he had met and, to an extent, known him.

Johnny ‘Edge’ was a nickname. He was actually Johnny Edgcombe. What he did in 1962 was the catalyst that triggered the Profumo Scandal in 1963 which played no minor part in bringing down the Conservative government in 1964.

Edgecombe had fired six shots at osteopath Stephen Ward’s mews flat, where Edgecombe’s ex-girlfriend Christine Keeler was hiding.

Malcolm’s barely-contained thrill at having a link with Johnny ‘Edge’ was the same thrill I could sense in him when famed 1960s South London gangster Charlie Richardson came to a party on Malcolm’s floating pub the Wibbley Wibbley. It is the same thrill some people feel if they have an even tenuous link with the Kray Twins.  I have heard more than one stand-up comic joke about the TARDIS-like capacity of the Blind Beggar, seeing as how most of the population of East London appears to have been in the pub the night Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell.

It is the thrill of one or two degrees of separation from important historic or society-changing events.

Malcolm had three degrees of separation from the Krays, which I think he always cherished and which is mentioned towards the start of his autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake (now out-of-print, but currently available from me via Amazon at  the remarkably reasonable price of £49.99 + p&p).

When Mad Frank Fraser, the Richardson’s ‘enforcer’ was shot in the thigh during a fight at Mr Smith’s Club in Catford, he was eventually left lying in the front garden of Malcolm’s aunt Rosemary and uncle Doug. The shooting was part of the bad blood and linked events which led to the shooting in the Blind Beggar which brought the Kray Twins and, to an extent, the Richardsons down.

Links within links within links.

To an extent, I share Malcolm’s thrill with one or two degrees of linked separation from national, international or parochial history. Everything and everyone is inter-linked.

Malcolm never met Mad Frank Fraser. I have and I am glad to have met and chatted to him a couple of times: the man who once lay bleeding in Malcolm’s aunt and uncle’s front garden.

Links within links within links.

Once, Mad Frank told me he worried “a bit” what people would say about him after he was dead, because what people are seen as being is ultimately not what they are but what people write about them in retrospect.

A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian jungle really can change the world. Ordinary unsung individuals can be part of the chain that creates historic events. Or, to quote anti-hero Mick’s line in Lindsay Anderson’s trendy 1968 film If….

“One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place…”

Or six bullets.

I am getting a Scottish passport – with Sean Connery

American comedian Lewis Schaffer recently Tweeted a #ff recommending this blog for its “casual xenophobia and non-casual name-dropping”.

Well, for sure, when Scotland gets independence, I am going to get a Scottish passport as soon as possible because it will be safer than a British or (by then) English passport.

If your aircraft gets hijacked or you get involved in any other terrorist mass hostage situation, the first people to be shot are the Americans – obviously – or sometimes the Israelis who, for some semi-mystifying reason count as Americans in such situations.

The next to be shot – depending on the former colonial history of the people with the guns and the bad attitude problem are either the British or the French.

The last people to get shot are likely to be Irish or Swiss passport holders… The Irish because even the most uneducated terrorist has probably heard of the IRA and you don’t shoot your own; it’s like Toyota owners being polite to each other on the roads in Britain. And the Swiss are fairly safe because even the most uneducated terrorist is likely to know the Swiss are neutral in everything and have never done anything – they did not even invent the cuckoo clock.

It’s also probable, of course, that most terrorist organisations bank with the Swiss and you don’t want to annoy people who are giving you a good interest rate and hiding your identity from the CIA, the NSA and MI6.

So I am going to get a Scottish passport when Scotland breaks from the United Kingdom.

I have no idea why Lewis Schaffer – who continues to appear on stage every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in London’s longest-running solo comedy show at The Source Below in Soho – should complain about name-dropping.

But, then, he’s a New York Jew.

What does a colonial kid like that know?

Marilyn Monroe once reportedly asked Laurence Olivier when being served doughy things at a Jewish dinner while they were filming The Prince and The Showgirl in London:

“What are those?”

“They’re matzoh balls, Marilyn,” Olivier told her.

“Gee, Laurence,” she replied, “Don’t they eat any other part of a matzoh?”

Also has the otherwise street-savvy Lewis never heard of adding random Tags to blogs to try to get extra hits? I haven’t even mentioned the racist Britney Spears animal sex tape scandal involving Prince William, Kate Middleton and Justin Bieber referred-to by the porno stand-up comics in the inept IKEA ad currently running on British television but obviously not on the hardcore sex channels nor on Colonel Gaddafi’s cage-fighting Libyan TV channel? The one with the trans-sexual goldfish. Nor have I mentioned granny sex (popular with Lewis). Nor Japanese schoolgirl facials.

What is it with the Japanese and sperm?

Anti-Semitic Royalist fans of ‘the C word’ and Baby Spice in chocolate

My blog seems to have almost doubled the number of hits it gets in the last few days. I guess that’s what comes of writing about the words “fuck” and “cunt”.

It’s a great thing – the Google search engine.

I used to have photographs on my website. One was what I thought was an interesting picture of the interior of a mid-1980s school room under Communist dictator Enver Hoxha. (I have since got a life.) Imagine my surprise at the number of people who found my photos page because of their Google searches for “Albanian schoolboys”.

Who is reading my blog now?

Some of the search engine phrases put in by people who found my blog by accident yesterday were:

– john fleming east belfast

– is kate middleton jew

– how to act manic

– racism addressed on tv

– swearing / c word

From this, I can only assume my readers include:

– a sectarian stalker and/or hit man

– an anti Semite with Royalist tendencies

– a stand up comic and/or depressive with manic/depressive aspirations

– a racist media academic

– a BBC Radio 4 presenter

And who is to say that is a bad collection of people?

But I have added “rampant meerkats” and “Baby Spice in chocolate” to the tags of this blog entry to get a better class of reader.

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

Kate Middleton, Mary Millington, Adolf Hitler, the New York Jew and the British porn baron

Six degrees of separation? Probably less.

I was talking to someone who went to University (UCL, London) with the mother of Kate Middleton, our possibly future Queen. He didn’t know her well, only peripherally. But he also knew peripherally fellow London University student David Sullivan (Queen Mary College) who was captain of a rowing team at the time but who was also chummy with future porn star Mary Millington and who was dipping his toes in what was later to become his vast pornography empire, including the Daily Sport and Sunday Sport newspapers.

This vague link between our possibly future Queen’s mum and one of the UK’s primary purveyors of soft-ish porn reminds me of esteemed American comedian Andrew J Lederer who, a few years ago, built an entire Edinburgh Fringe comedy show round his close link to Adolf Hitler.

Well, one degree of separation (or is it two?)

A few years before, at some movie event in the United States, Andrew had met and shaken the hand of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s famous film director. She, obviously, had shaken Hitler’s hand way back in the 1930s and 1940s. So Andrew, a New York Jew, was only one handshake removed from Adolf Hitler.

All this and I’ve still never met Baby Spice. So near and yet, tragically, so far.

Life.

Tell me about it.