Yesterday was like all last days before the start of the Edinburgh Fringe

It is the same every year but different.

Horrible.

Dies horribilis.

I got to bed at 2.15am this morning and set off for Edinburgh by car at 6.15pm.

Yesterday started at 8.00am with the postman ringing on my door bell.

I went downstairs. I did not have my keys in my pocket.

“Hold on a minute! I don’t have my keys! I’ll be back in a mo!”

Upstairs. I could not find my keys.

Spare bedroom. Look for the spare set of keys. Could not find the spare set of keys.

Downstairs. The postman had gone. I could not see anything left outside the door.

“I won’t be here tomorrow to collect it from the sorting office,” I thought.

I went back upstairs. I could not find my keys.

“It is a bad enough problem when you are locked out of your house,” I thought, “but it is actually worse if you are locked inside it and can’t get out.”

It was going to be embarrassing to phone the two neighbours who have spare sets of keys to my place. And I think they may be away on holiday. Which would mean phoning my friend in Greenwich and asking her to get two trains across London to let me out of my own house.

Then the phone rang.

It was a call from New York. It was not glamorous.

It was now 8.30am.

“Buggeration!” I suddenly thought. “It is 3.30am in New York. What on earth is he doing?”

I found my spare keys in the spare bedroom.

The postman had left a package outside my door. It was not for me.

I had to go to Kwik-Fit for 9.00am to have my tyres and treads checked. One of my headlight bulbs had also stopped working the previous night.

“Great!” I thought. “The Kwik-Fit man can fit it quicker than me.”

I am not one of Life’s naturally practical men.

The Kwik-Fit man had trouble getting access to the headlight bulb; another Kwik-Fit man tried. He had trouble. I looked at the area under the bonnet behind the headlamps. It looked hermetically sealed in plastic.

The two Kwik-Fit men said to me:

“Can’t do it. It’s got a plug socket thing attached. You can only get it from a Toyota main dealer.”

They are very nice people at Kwik-Fit. I like them. They did not charge me.

I drove to my local Toyota dealer.

The young couple in front of me had been waiting 20 minutes for two light bulbs. That is the short version of their service trauma. Toyota are usually very good. They were having an off-day.

“Halfords told us we could only get Toyota light bulbs for our car from Toyota,” the young couple said.

“Kawk-Fit told me that about my car,” I said.

They were not impressed.

Eventually, I got my light bulb fitted.

Then a travel company phoned about a trip I am making next year. There was a long but necessary 15-minute conversation. It was almost all settled. Except Aeroflot have not yet confirmed their flight schedule for next April. I was told I could travel by Emirates, but I prefer Aeroflot for the eccentricity factor because, when I last travelled with them under Communism, scowling stewardesses used to serve you caviar to demonstrate what life was like in a true Socialist paradise like the Soviet Union. Things may have changed now they have discovered capitalist corruption and McDonalds.

Back home, I found my doorkeys under a Boden clothing catalogue.

I started to wonder if Johnnie Boden’s wares had reached Novosibirsk yet. They do very good winter coats. You need good clothing in Novosibirsk.

I think Edinburgh Fringe fever may have started early this year. It is a swirling of uncertainties in the head, coupled with a slight shivering. There is no known antidote except September.

Around 1.00am this morning, I collected elfin comedian Laura Lexx (she was once employed as an elf in Lapland) from the Elephant in South London (American readers will just have to pass over this reference, mystified) for the trip up to Edinburgh later in the morning. Laura had no Boden clothing, as far as I could tell, and had given me the impression she had packed as if for a year-long expedition to the Sahara and the Antarctic by the massed ranks of the Dagenham Girl Pipers and would have the entire contents of the Colindale Newspaper Library for her Fringe play Ink.

Unfortunately, she had packed quite modestly.

I told her: “I had been going to say I have a Toyota, not a TARDIS.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because,” I explained, “I pre-wrote tomorrow’s blog and I was going to say you had too much luggage.”

“Well just make it up,” she told me. “I don’t mind.”

When we got back to my home, there was a drip-drip-drip sound in the kitchen.

“What’s that?” Laura asked.

I thought for a bit. “That’ll be the new washing machine,” I explained.

And it was.

A handyman (much cheaper than a plumber) had sorted a leak on the water tap when connected to the new washing machine; he had made his own rubber washer to stop the water leaking.

It clearly had not worked.

We mopped the floor under the washing machine, having dragged it out of its recess and into the middle of the kitchen floor.

I got to bed at 2.15am. I will post this blog around 6.15am.

Ars longa, vita brevis.

Or maybe Limbus longa, vita brevis.

Look it up on Google Translate.

But most definitely the traditional pre-Fringe dies horribilis.

Spaghetti-juggling at the Fringe will be like a walk in the park.

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?

Why it’s no surprise Japan is in a mess – and why their politicians wear blue boiler suits at press conferences

A friend of mine went to Japan last October.

When she came back, she sold all her shares in Japanese businesses.

Lucky her, as it turns out – after their earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns in the last five days.

But, of course, that is not why she took all her investments out of all Japan.

She wisely sold her shares last October because, having been there, she had lost all confidence in the country.

She had expected a vibrant, go-getting, futuristic country. But, when she travelled round the Far East, she found Japan was not that country. All her pre-conceptions of Japan she found fulfilled in South Korea.

Japan was a comparatively old-fashioned country with no noticeable efficiency in the workplace or in the infrastructure.

“They say the tower blocks are built to withstand earthquakes,” she told me last year. “But I wouldn’t trust them.”

She was shocked when she got on trains in the rush hour.

“All I saw,” she told me yesterday, “was a sea of ‘salarymen’ and they were all wearing cheap suits.”

“Where were all the secretaries?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But the country is still sexist. It’s like some throwback to an earlier era. And I couldn’t get over the shabby suits.”

She went to Tokyo, Osaka and other Japanese cities and found the same everywhere: oceans of salarymen in cheap suits and people using old-fashioned brick-like mobile phones. No new technology visibly in use on the streets.

“I never saw an iPad the whole time I was in Japan,” she told me yesterday. “And the young people were not dressed smartly, they weren’t trendy and, it seemed to me, they weren’t very lively.”

It was, she said, a country that has lost its way, possibly through complacency.

The older generation seems mystified as to why the younger generation does not want to go abroad to see other cultures. And, apparently, the younger generation is not spending money the way, in all other industrial cultures, young people do.

It gave the impression of a country that did not look to the future and did not even particularly look to the distant past.

It was a country stuck in the closing years of the 20th century.

“I’m not surprised the nuclear reactors don’t seem to have been built particularly well,” my friend said to me yesterday.

What mystified me, though, was…

Why is it that, when Japanese politicians – the Prime Minister downwards – appear at press conferences on TV they are all wearing the same uniform light blue boiler suits? Very well-designed boiler suits, I admit. But they all look like they are going to service Toyota cars.

I like Toyota cars. I have one myself. They are very well serviced. But why are the politicians not wearing snazzy, expensive black business suits?

It’s like they are wearing Chinese Mao suits re-designed for the Japanese by someone in Milan.

Why?

So, before writing this blog, I asked another friend – she worked for a Japanese multinational in Tokyo and speaks fluent Japanese.

“Apparently,” she tells me, “the blue suits they are wearing are search and rescue overalls and are to bring the high and mighty down to the level of those on the ground and give the impression they, too, are part of the relief effort.”

Ye Gods! If David Cameron wore a search and rescue suit at a press conference after some major disaster, he would get crucified in the press for bullshit and spin.

Never go south of the River

In Apocalypse Now! the character Chef, played by Frederic Forrest, says after something unexpectedly leaps out of the jungle at him (I’m trying not to give the shock away): “Never get out of the fucking boat! Never get out of the boat! I gotta remember! Gotta remember! Never get out of the boat!”

I can sympathise with him.

In London, the equivalent truism is “Never go South of the River. Always remember. Never go South of the River.”

I remember reading a piece in the Daily Telegraph years ago (I do love the Daily Telegraph and still lament the passing of its Page Three) which pointed out that the southern bank of the Thames from London Bridge to Deptford – or it might have been Dartford – has been a haunt of dodgy geezers and crime families since Elizabethan times.

I have been in Greenwich most of this week and, at 0100 in the early hours of Thursday morning, I went down to find the front passenger window of my car had been smashed in. The double locking system on my Toyota means that, if you do smash through the window, you still can’t open the door from the inside. So the yobbo only rummaged through my glove compartment and only managed to steal… the Toyota manual for my car.

I can’t fault his taste, though I can fault his efficiency. He missed the SatNav.

And now I have to fork out six quid to get a new manual.

I went to Greenwich Market yesterday. Two stall holders told me that, earlier in the day, it had been snowing inside the market.

Greenwich Market has a roof.

Never go South of the River.

Always remember.

Never go South of the River…