bus you are so gay/ You never come my way/ I’ll wait and wait and wait/ Maybe this is/ The day.

Pretty ladies walk on by/ They wish that they could fly/ They’ll never try/ Why?

The bus journey does begin/ Driver sips from bottle/ Gordon gin.

Bus takes to ring road/ Driver ignores goad/ No anger allow’d.

In paper, journalist debate/ With Blair, we should wipe the slate/ Book deal/ Too late!

Bus enters countryside/ Where Daily Mail claims/ Morals slide/ Dunno mate/ Just here for the ride.

Bus trundles on/ Journey/ Very long/ Was my decision completely wrong?/ Ah good/ Here’s airport/ You Nong!

Journey now must end/ Only one passenger did i offend/ Sat on her lap/ Had nap/ No dribble/ No quibble.

Return from work/ passengers solemn/driver like gollum/rolling can of beer/Finlay Quay in ear

Rolling beer can/you will fan/out when/i stamp on you/stop rolling man!

Airports always provide/ me with despair/human race /always on move/ stop and take in view/not you, pilot/concentrate, ya fool!

Oh discarded pile of wires and cable/your empty girths enable/ thoughts of co-alition/ many colours entwined/ bereft of worth.

Approaching city centre/wave to Nell/fan of bus/oh holy driver/don’t rush.

End of bad poetry day in sight/ my attitude suggests /I might/ invoke a meta-narrative trope / the writer can but hope.

Thank god that’s over.

UPDATE: Will brought his website back online. He’s busy with another project at the moment, with information forthcoming. The real world seeps into our enjoyment of the digital, as ever!

First off, and it’s obvious really, is that stand-up is a performance. Just as acting in a play is. You have to seek out the character that you will perform and what will best suit the type of material you want to focus your act on. What’s interesting is that this process of finding your comedy persona is as complex as any artists’ exploration of the themes of their work. If you’ve never really known that artists undergo this process, then visit any college or university end of year exhibitions and compare the work of first or foundation year students with final year students. Broadly speaking, what you often find is that artists begin by exploring what it means to be an artist. The work is often the artist trying to find out why their own creations can be considered art or they begin to think about their place in the art world. And this in turn begins to unravel the fragile nature of the art world. Something that isn’t always obvious to outsiders, who often perceive it as a tightly formed, coherent place. As they progress through the years, they find a more intimate and complex relationship with their work and themes and begin to look further out or even further within themselves. Hopefully.

Comedy shares some of these conceits. For example, exploring the means of expression and the ‘language’ that you are going to use. And in a way, I’m quite directly referring to the words used by the performer, not just the ‘language’ in a semiotic way. But this is about getting to the heart of how you’ll frame your opinion about something. Comedians have an opinion about something. They all do, even if their jokes don’t being with, “have you ever noticed?” or “Why do some people/things/the world..?” It informs their argument about a subject. Even someone as surreal as The Mighty Boosh have a viewpoint. Even Jimmy Carr has a viewpoint. This is a response to something in life. Often it’s about casting something in life through a conceptual prism and shining it back out into the world, directly into people’s faces.

When I try to understand the immediacy of response that comedy demands and should evoke in the audience, I think about The Chapman brothers, whose work is often shocking and feels slightly exploitative of the themes it takes on. There’s an immediate gut reaction to the work and that often feels as though it’s enough to be take away with you. There is another layer there if you want to dig deeper but often it can result in wiping away the first reaction. Some of the work just doesn’t stand up to closer scrutiny. So it is within the varied field of comedy. A nob gag, most of the time, is just a nob gag. Or a racist ‘joke’ is just that. But, handled intelligently by someone like Richard Herring (in his Hitler Moustache show), it can bend that notion and leave you questioning your own response. Maybe ‘I’m’ the racist because I’ve reacted in the preordained way to that comment/joke? You can question and play around with those concepts. You don’t have to go that deep, obviously. But you don’t have to walk around a gallery thinking beyond the purely aesthetic: it’s just there if you want it.

Just to explore this notion of performance slightly further before I finish, I’ve noticed a dichotomy between the audience and their assumption and the performer. In comedy, the crowd assumes that it’s ‘easy’ and that the performer is having as much fun as they are. In the same way that pub banter is just getting pissed and enjoying some jokes amongst mates. This is why people don’t think of comedy as performance. Because of the way narrative is often told, in the first person and the character shares the same name as the performer in ‘every’ case and, quite simply, the normal tell-tale signs of fiction aren’t in place. There are no signals that this is a fictitious account of an event. Except in the more surreal story-tellers (Eddie Izzard for example) it could be someone recounting a thing that happened. Except, that those off-the-cuff stories have been written down, tried out and redrafted until they shine like the best Dave Eggers micro-fiction you could imagine. The skill, like any performer, is in being natural and relaxed. And inviting the audience in to allow you to take them through a narrative journey and to get them to react. And they must react. Despite what I’ve written above, you must have that immediate response. If nobody laughs, you aren’t doing your job. The chin-stroking can come later but the first response has to come from the gut.

Oh, you know what? I have actually just tried to explain this video and some of my thoughts on the interactivity. I’m nothing if not inconsistent.

The moral of this story is, I guess, that you shouldn’t waste your time reading my blog.

p.s. tomorrow I may well be eating lasagne for breakfast. My life eh? Eh?

I like them though. They allow me to sneer at things and point and huff and think, “Yeah, sure I do those things. But I’ve got ironic detachment on my side. I got me copies of…. errr Deleuze and stuff on my shelves. (I have no idea which philosopher deals best with irony, but I can bet my arse it isn’t one the continental ones. The French probably don’t do irony.) It helps to add a bit of swearing in as well, sounds more like you’re not the wishy washy liberal holistic cosmic child you fear you might really be (I also have a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead on my bookshelf, for fucks sake (see what I mean about swearing?))

The point being that, although my first gut reaction to anything is the above, every now and then I’m shocked out of it by someone. There I was today, sitting in a small cafe in Coventry called The Tin Angel. Lovely little place full of arty paintings and posters of small indie bands. Indie bands in the proper sense of the name, not an A&R man’s idea of Indie as a 90s genre to be mass-marketed as ‘real’ music for the kids, but proper bands working the small gig circuit and earning their chops, maaann! So, keep in mind that I was sitting in there ‘working’ on my laptop like some Wired magazine baby-boomer sell out wet dream honky. I couldn’t have been any more of a stereotype myself  if I’d been writing a novel about cyberpunks who run the world from their pizza encrusted bedrooms in their mum’s basements. In fact I wasn’t working on my cyberpunk novel cuz, you know, that got rejected and stuff by Faber and Faber and Martin Amis probably wrote it already but it wasn’t classified as Sci-Fi, right? No idea now what I was doing, but it involved a latte (without soya milk, the cheapskates)

Hopefully you’ve an idea of the kind of place I was in? I really like places like this and Coventry doesn’t have enough of them. And just as I’m about to do whatever it is people do on the Internet these days (probably download an app to help them download more apps) this girl sitting several tables away started to sing to the tune on the soundsystem. Ah Christ, I thought, obnoxious and pretentious late-teen brat thinking she’s all like, “I was discovered in a cafe singing away just to myself and didn’t even realise that people were listening.” There’s always one of these knocking about. They follow me wherever I go, you know? And seldom can they actually sing.

So imagine how I felt when I tuned in properly and she had an absolutely lovely voice? I was literally shocked and stunned at how well she could sing. And she really wasn’t trying to attract attention: you could see she was just making a point about something to her friend and had that youthful exuberance and joy at just being in the moment and alive, right now, in the 21st century and everything was going to be great, and she was in a cool cafe and enjoying life.

And that in itself was enough of a reason for me to continue hating her. The angel-voiced bastard!

It felt a bit like that last night with the election coverage on TV. The BBC went all out and there was much walking through virtual sets and pointing at imaginary dominoes and a giant iPad that stood over the heads of two presenters like the monolith from Clark’s 2001. But instead of embedding the possibility of a brand new dawn of civilisation, this one was was designed to remind us of all the fuck-ups we’ve made in the past. With a slap of an icon, we were shown the seats held by the Tories after the last election. Another slap and we were shown the spread of seats held in the form of hexagons and told how stupid we all were to have believed in the actual map coverage. We were bitch-slapped into political awakening by two harbingers of doom standing before the monolith, each daring the other to come up with something even more fact-based than the last statement. If your graphics are big enough, then it must be right?

My favourite pundit of the night was Mariella Frostrup who said something along the lines of ‘how typical of men to try to predict something that hasn’t even happened yet?’ Sadly, I wasn’t paying that much attention at the time because I was trying to work out if it was Ian Hislop next to her. It was either him or Paul Merton. I get them mixed up if they aren’t on the usual sides of the screen. Like two aging, insufferable versions of Ant and Dec. I mean even more insufferable. I was hoping to see Armando Iannucci who had tweeted about being there at some point. How would he cope, being in a live version of Thick Of It? But I missed him. I took a bath at one point and all I could hear was Bruce Forsyth blubbering on about having his back to the audience and wheeling out a thirty year old catchphrase. Twat.

Half the fun of the election was following people on Twitter who seemed to be having a much better time of it all getting pissed and stuffing themselves and tapping on iPhones. Ellie Harrison, the artist had launched a drinking game for the election night, hopefully that went well. As with most things in life, the ‘event’ of the election was slightly disjointed from any sense of the real by the mediation of the errr, media. Personally, I find it hard to relate to much of the cold reality of it without thinking of giant swingometers, dominoes with politicians faces on and a massive table with numerous monitors embedded across its huge facade. Sure, I know what the effects of the election may be, but at the moment it’s hard to know what the real effects might be.

This morning, with a hung parliament in the air and politicians running from each others houses to join forces like kids who suddenly have to tell each other that were only pretending not to be friends and are really bezzie mates, anything could happen.

Me, I feel like I just returned from Viet Nam with the faint wiff of guilt and remorse about me. Should I have done things differently? Maybe I didn’t survive and only my soul escaped from the night before? Will I end up in a dismal veteran’s hospital of the mind, with no proper health care. In a few months no one will give a fuck about what we did here today in the name of freedom. Still, the graphics were pretty cool and we know that Bruce is still alive, so it’s not all bad eh?

I wonder if it’s okay to feel happy with the world? Shouldn’t I be more moribund and on the verge of tears all the time? Maybe being miserable is just too much like hard work day in, day out? It was fine when we all believed in god, because then we just assumed that there was a special purpose for us all and we were put here to suffer. Eventually coming to some divine realisation that god had a plan for us and it probably involved struggling for a bit and then chilling out with Him and smoking a bong and listening to Jimmy Hendrix gigs for all eternity. Or Paul Simon? Paul Simon is dead, right?

Nowadays it’s just us and a few godless years of getting by as best we can before it all comes to a crashing end and our mind fades out like a swarm of fireflies struck down, with Flyaway vaporising us in mid-flight. Or a horrific swat flattening us into instant nothingness? Either way, we have to do our best, right? Are you still with me?

Don’t worry, this doesn’t end with a call to arms for a suicide cult to be formed somewhere in an obscure middle-England village hall somewhere outside of Kent. Order of business: a) choosing a winner for best cucumber sandwich b) Fundraiser for church roof c) Kool-aid, orange or raspberry?

Maybe because I have a slightly healthy obsession with my own mortality I’m better able to deal with it? If, as Buddha says, all life is suffering and we have to come to terms with that before reaching Nirvana (the spiritual nirvana, keep up!) I’m on the path to dealing with life. If you’re comfortable with the way things are, then you can deal with almost everything?

Or I’m mental and should be sectioned.

Still, doesn’t solve another twenty four hours going by and nothing having been done. Maybe I’m not on the path to enlightenment but just lazy?

As usual, I awoke to the strains of Uncertain Smile by The The. I’d programmed it into my alarm clock to give me an almost pathologically positive start to the day. Who the hell wouldn’t feel uplifted and ready to go sign on the dole with Matt Johnson singing:

Peeling the skin back from my eyes, I felt suprised
that the time on the clock was the time I usually retired
to the place where I cleared my head of you;
but just for today, i think I’ll lie here and dream of you.

Funny, it always seems more positive when it’s coming out of my crackly electronic alarm. But now I’ve written it down, it sounds a little… bleak! Still, whatever gets you dressed in the morning eh? Today was fresh jeans day: you can’t imagine how exciting that makes the day for me. Fresh jeans and yesterday’s shirt. Because I wouldn’t want people to think I’d gone totally ostentatious.

I turn the kettle on and lay there thinking about whether or not I should have toast or porridge. Porridge is good and I may go to the pub later, so it’s best to have a full stomach. Right about then, I realise that I’ve put the kettle on but haven’t even left the bed.  I pull the quilt up a little and rest my chin on the edge of it, listening to the slow bubbling of water. Was that me? I think it may have been me.

The kettle pops and dies in a slow mashup of steam and metal switch sounds. I’ve suddenly gone off the idea of a coffee so I slip straight into my fresh jeans and grab my dole card. Sitting on the settee to lace my shoes, I eye the kettle on the kitchen sideboard across from me. It says nothing. I suddenly feel as though it has betrayed me and I’m surprised when I look up from the final loop to see it still sitting there. If it isn’t there when I return, I’ll know it’s industry, betraying me, just like my teacher said it would. Then we’ll all know that he was right and not just a loony Marxist, as my Dad used to say he was.

Claiming unemployment goes according to plan. I pretend I’m looking for a job and they write something down. When they ask about any skills development training, I feel I should mention the kettle switching thing but decide to hold back for now. Don’t want to start a riot for those sort of skills. Not ’till I’ve worked out how to monetize the bastard out of it. Leaving ten minutes later, I nod hello to a couple of other regulars and flip my fone out of my pocket.

“Mum? Hi are you busy?”

“I have to feed the cat at eleven o’clock. What do you want?”

I ask if I can come around and promise I’ll only take a few minutes of her time. Mum loves the cat but every now and then I wonder… nah doesn’t matter. I arrive at her place within the hour and go straight in. She’s holding Mitzi in her lap and stroking with a long, determined gesture across his back. I sit opposite her and notice my jeans aren’t as well ironed as I thought.

A minute passes.

“Mum, I was wondering if..” she stops me with a pale, bony hand in the air, gesturing me to silence. We listen for something that only she seems capable of hearing and then lets me continue.

“Mum, has anyone in the family ever shown signs of…” I pause because special powers doesn’t seem the right word. A bit too important for a family like mine. Perhaps ‘loaned ability’ would be the right phrase? I blunder through and tell her about the kettle and a couple of other kettle related incidents that suddenly come to mind.

“Your great great Uncle Ebeneezer had the ability to boil water in a kettle through the power of thought as well,” she says. I open my mouth and repeat his name. She stops me halfway through. “I know, before the days of electric. Just coal. So how did he do it? Nobody knows.”

I’m actually wondering why the hell we’ve got a relative called Ebeneezer, but I soldier on. “I’m not the first?”

She tells me all about how Uncle Ebeneezer first discovered his super power and how he enjoyed years of fame and made a small fortune touring the royal houses of Europe. She tells me about his affairs with countesses and how he enjoyed the finest wines and food available at the time. Then she explains that after the novelty wore off, the upper classes turned against him, as they do with any novelty.

“Of course,” she says, flipping the cat’s tail back and forth across her chin, “some say it was also because he’d slept with half of the daughters of the countesses and created a certain amount of… jealousy amongst the not-so-pretty royals. But your father says nobody objects to a bit of that sort of thing amongst the upper classes, so who knows?”

It turns out that old Ebeneezer ended up in poverty and swinging from the front gates of some Swiss castle, in retaliation for an unwanted pregnancy and an unpaid water bill. Mum warns me about revealing my powers to all and sundry, for fear of falling foul of the same courtly distractions. She is right of course. Though god knows I could do with the money, and it’s been years since I had a good..”

“You must never, ever reveal your super power no matter how tempting. Understand?”

I nod in silence and run a hand across the crease in my jeans that disappears as I straighten my leg.

“Excellent. Now be a good lad and put the kettle on will you, I’m bloody dying of thirst here.”

Have we started yet? I think I just typed into a different window on my laptop. There’s a faint chance that I’ve just told my mum that I have terrible diarrhea after eating paella!

“The ingredients for paella are straightforward enough. The chorizo and the pork belly (with skin removed) can be cooked in the normal way. But you really need to be careful when you do the seafood bits.” He was listening to the tall dark-haired man behind the counter giving him advice on how to cook the night’s meal. His mind wandered across the lamb and the mince beef as the voice held him to the spot. It wasn’t an unbearable voice, just a commanding and controlling voice. Like a benevolent sergeant major. And he was interested, he just couldn’t keep focused long enough to take it in. He nodded as the man flipped over the silver, heat-sealed bag with the mussels in. “Good luck.”

“Will I need it?” he asked, looking at the bag.

“I mean for the date. Tonight.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Come back and let me know how it goes. I’ll do you a nice deal on some beef for the next one!” The man’s voice shot over his shoulder and out into the street. He was already thinking about the flowers and cutlery.

Ikea had some nice cutlery. He figured that the 365+ would be a good deal. But did he really have a need for the whole set? The date might not lead to anything and then all that money would be a waste. His bag was slung snugly over his shoulder (£10 from Habitat five years ago). It was tattered but reliable, with its unknown quantities of secret pockets. He casually scanned around and then flipped two forks into it. He circled and then fingered two more pieces in. After ten minutes and one crowd of busy Chinese students, he had eight knives, five forks and six spoons. You can’t be too mathematical about these things when you’re doing it on the ultra-cheap.

Would he need plates? Yes: his were old and had faded Thomas The Tank Engine logos on them. Faded logos weren’t exactly the right image on a first date. Deciding that he couldn’t fit any more into his bag without drawing the attention of the Ikea-bots, he begrudgingly picked up a blue bag and shoved a box of cheap plates in. At the checkout he smiled and engaged in a bit of aimless banter. “Going to rain later. Did you see the X Factor? I just nicked loads so I’m okay for a catalogue, thanks.” They laughed at it. Nobody would admit it, so it’s obviously just a joke? He even bought a hotdog on his way out of the store. But then pocketed some Dime bars. Buy one, steal one.

On the top of the bus, he snapped the end of the toffee bar. The chewy gunk didn’t mix well with the watery hot-dog flavour coating the roof of his mouth. Jamie wouldn’t approve. He liked it though, reminded him of Mum and Dad and trips to Skegness. “This is going to be bloody brilliant,” he said to no one in particular. The pensioner in front of him turned and smiled, nervously once she realised he was on his own. He snapped his mouth shut in a tight, self-content smile. Yes, Dust Bunny would be proved wrong.