Mister Blue Sky

Spring Sprang SPRUNG!  Sleeping with the windows open!  Sunshine and birdsong!  Geoff Lynnde and the Electric Light Orchestra!

 

House is full of chenille fibers, floating, patient, waiting to infiltrate and destroy our lungs.  It’s my fault for not rotary-cutting all of that upholstery fabric – I had to go and use shears.  There’s just something chompily appealing about cutting fabric with scissors.  And there’s more precision, at least for me.  When I start cutting vast yardage with a rotary cutter, I get speed on, and I get all crazy, and before you know it I’m off grain and it’s all bad.  So I’m afraid the lungs will have to go.

 

Yesterday we accidentally began to eat cigars.  Very strange.  A portent of randomness and laffs, I hope.

 

There are no trains from Manchester Airport to Ravenglass-for-Eskdale on Sundays, so Jenn Higgins and I will need to stay the night in Manchester when we arrive on the 27^th, enabling us to tool around to a club to, perhaps, enjoy the Mersey Sound, if it hasn’t left by the time we get there, or, indeed, already.  And on the way back, after Thursday’s tournament at Muncaster, we have a nice choice of trains to get back to Manchester on Friday 1 June.  Then another night in Manchester, and then homeward on a direct flight.

 

It worried me that I had this One Joke that was Extremely Dumb, but it made Everyone (and I mean “absolutely every last one”) laugh Much Harder than any of my other material did.  That was until I mentioned the One Stupid Gag to Kearnsie over dinner before MacBeth on Friday night (I said it!  MacBeth MacBeth MacBeth!  I am not afraid!  I think that curse only really applies to o’er-proud usurpers anyway – and I think you may know some).  Naturally, she laughed until she slid off the bench, for no-one is immune to this joke, nor never has been, except of course for me – something about the immunity of the carrier.  But then Kearnsie expanded on the joke.  She suggested all kinds of innovations, including a way to make it audience-interactive, even to the point of placing all the variables for the gag in the hands of the audience, making the teller both vulnerable and likeable!

 

So if everything else in my routine bombs, at least I’ve got a Secret, Stupid Kill that will at the very least make everyone forget the two or three failed gags that precede it.  I must practice it with a microphone to make sure it’s still funny over a PA.