There wasn't going to be time to go to the gym this morning, so I was going to shower at the flat. Last time I had washed here I had put my damp towel on the radiator in the hall to dry. I went to pick it up and ... oh my God. It wasn't there. Someone had stolen my slightly soiled towel. Who would do such a thing?
Of course we all know who first sprang to mind. This was the kind of thing that Andrew Collings would do. Knowing the towel was mine and contained traces of my dried skin he had quite possibly taken it into his room and fashioned it into a caricature of me that he would then use for masturbatory purposes. It is surely the first assumption anyone would make when anything gets stolen, even if they aren't living with Collings. It's just the kind of thing he would do.
But maybe it was Justin Moorhouse. Perhaps he had not vacuum packed quite enough pairs of pants (he has brought 28 pairs with him this Fringe - but maybe he has been getting through two a day) or the ones he brought are not large enough to cover his not inconsiderable Northern arse, so he had taken my towel to create a large nappy for himself.
Or could it be Tom Wrigglesworth? He didn't look like the kind of person who would want to use a fat, middle-aged man's soiled towel, but then it's always the last person you suspect.
The list of suspects could not be long. It might be my girlfriend, but then she is imaginary and generally speaking the people of the fantastical plane are unable to move physical objects. It might have been me I suppose. I have been misplacing and losing plenty of things in my decrepitude and weariness (luckily most of which have found their way back to me). Might I have moved my own towel somewhere without remembering. Or had I just left it in my gaping bag and it had fallen by the wayside.
There was one more possible culprit - our current house guest Andre Vincent, but surely he wouldn't arrive in a flat, see a towel on a radiator and assume that that was a) unused and b) free for all.
What kind of a monster would steal and use another man's towel? Is nothing sacred?
But there was more dirty work afoot. Andrew Collings has been taking a meagre collection at the end of his free show, in which punters who pity him for his woeful attempts to be the new Lenny Bruce have tossed in a few coppers. He has been confused and bamboozled about what to do with his riches, but also unable to take such small items of change out and about with him. As I am taking coins into the bank every day I kindly offered to exchange some of the notes from the SCOPE collection for coins of the same value to make his life easier. I gave him five ten pound notes last night and he said he would count out £50 in change for me. He left a bag of change on the kitchen table and I had intended to trust his count, not thinking that he even he would be despicable enough to steal money from cash-strapped disabled children. I could trust him, right.
But I was somewhat surprised by the lightness of the bag of coins. Collings had clearly forgotten that I have spent much of the last five or six years counting out coins for SCOPE and carrying bags of change to the bank, so I instinctively know how much fifty pounds of change would weigh. And this didn't feel like £50. It felt if anything like £39.98. So I counted the money to check and I was exactly correct. He had short changed me (in fact he had short changed the disabled children) by £10.02.
What kind of pariahs am I living with?
This disregard for human decency made Collings an even more likely candidate for the great towel theft too. He had clearly lost all sense of right and wrong and so would happily dry himself with a piece of cloth that had previously been used to dry my buttocks and get my anus gleaming.
I went down to his show to confront him and you could see that he was immediately nervous about the interrogation because he was sweating profusely. He claimed that it had been hot in the venue, but the pouring sweat said only one thing to me - GUILT.
He claimed that he was "illiterate with numbers", proving himself somewhat illiterate with words at the same time, and said the coin count was just a "mistake". He also said he had nothing to do with the towel.
I didn't know what to think.
We managed to get through
another podcast despite this suspicion and I was delighted to find that the kind people at the GRV had rescued both my projector connector and my swimming trunks. But had I dropped them or had Collings stolen them from my bag and thrown them under the chairs of the venue? Nothing was sure any more.
Whatever other crimes Collings is guilty of (I suspect his house is full of the corpses of prostitutes and choirboys, which is why I am never allowed to go round there) I was doubting that even he would have stolen a used towel. No one had stolen a towel for the first two weeks we have been here, but the day after Andre Vincent turned up one had gone mission. I was putting two and two together and making towel thief. When I got back from the podcast I came up with a brilliant detective plan. I decided to go into the spare room and see if the towel was in there. Genius.
And Vincent hadn't even attempted to hide his crime. The towel was draped over his radiator with guilt written all over it, as clearly as the drying arse and scrotum water that he had wiped up with it.
And yet, it all seemed a bit too much of an open and shut case. Had the guilty flat mate sensed the net closing in on them and decided to implicate a patsy?
As it turned out, no. Andre Vincent later admitted that he had thought the towel was free and he had just blithely taken it. He did try to come up with some excuse that one of the others had told him that the towel was up for grabs, but he's gone a bit quiet and doesn't seem to know which flat mate that was. So we can only assume that Andre Vincent is a towel thief and loves using the used towels of fat men, imagining the fibre contains homeopathic memories of the places and the things that the towel has wiped. I hope anyone googling Andre Vincent (surely only himself) will come across this fact and that his wikipedia page will be updated accordingly (citation needed? Link to this blog).
I attempted and failed to get any work done on AIOTM, but had a very enjoyable COAB gig and then headed up the hill to do another stand up appearance. But I wasn't going to hang around and came home straight afterwards for an earlyish night. Walking through the streets of drunken fools and hen nights and stag parties. I passed a homeless guy, packing up his pitch and facing away from the street, putting on a bandana. I looked at him in passing and he had his back to me and he said, "Only ignorant people stare." I don't know if he was addressing me. I wasn't staring and there's no way he could have seen me if I was. And I wanted to point out that his assertion isn't true. Pretty much everyone stares at some point. But I decided to let it go. In Edinburgh in the Fringe everything becomes like a performance piece and you never know what is real and what isn't. I was glad to escape the madness. Despite not going to the gym I ended up doing almost 2 hours walking today and I felt fit and alert when I got home. I am going to need to be. I have an awful lot on my plate.
