I am enjoying this Christmas week and for the second day in a row had a mildly boozy lunch with friends. Even a couple of lunchtime beers feels decadent nowadays. I sometimes pine for the old Richard Herring who was much better at drinking than me. But he is dead now. And as much as I liked him and admired his thirstiness I am glad he has gone. I am feeling oddly content with my life at the moment and seem to have some sense of perspective about what is important. It doesn't make for very funny blogs, but part of my sense of perspective is to realise that funny blogs, nice as they can be, are not the most important things in the world. Drinking beer and eating Chinese food with friends at lunch might be more important. Though Chinese food is not in my top types of food and does challenge me somewhat. I like to think I will eat anything nowadays, but the Chinese seem determined to put that to the test.
I ordered the special noodles and the waitress told me it had intestines in it, assuming, rather arrogantly that I wouldn't want that. Her racist assumption proved to be correct and I went for the pork noodles instead. But didn't ask if it had intestines in it. When you're dealing with a restaurant that thinks that putting intestines in noodles makes them special then you can't be sure. Others of my friends were more adventurous with their choices. One of my friends, as you might remember if you've seen Hitler Moustache, has a mum who is from somewhere in Asia (though I can never recall where) and he likes to show off at Chinese restaurant by ordering weird stuff and siding with the waiting staff when one of his friends doesn't fancy eating intestines in his noodles. He ordered some chicken feet and I felt sure he was trying to take the piss. Why eat a chicken's gnarly old feet when there is so much tasty stuff to try almost anywhere on the chicken that isn't its feet. But I rose to his bluff and gave it a try. As you might imagine a chicken's foot is mainly bone, though there is some skin on there too. They'd put a nice sauce over it to try and cover up this fact, but the only skin off a foot that I want to eat is skin picked off my own foot. I don't have to start picking skin off the feet of birds to have a meal. I am not sick. I wouldn't even eat the skin off the foot of another human, only my own feet (as I know where they've been). Duck feet, my lying friend assured me were even nicer. It would be hard for them to be worse.
But all these things are about what you're used to. Maybe eating the flesh and internal organs of a pig is a weird thing to do too. Later I passed a restaurant where dried ham hung in the window, with people sitting underneath the hocks, drinking wine. That's quite odd when you sit back and think of it. Dead pig being used chiefly for decoration. In the kingdom where people eat nothing but chicken feet, the man who doesn't eat chicken feet is the odd one.
I spent the afternoon in coffee shops doing phone interviews with journalists about
next year's tour (all dates selling OK, but you should be OK to get tickets apart from Belfast which is sold out Stafford which might have one or two more left and Salford which is close to being full). I am never sure how much use these interviews are, but they were mostly fun today. One journo seemed more drunk or jet lagged than me, certainly a little bit away with the fairies and it felt a bit like being interviewed by an absent-minded cloud, but apart from that there were some good chats. Will it sell any tickets? I don't know. But I doubt I would have got much done with my afternoon anyway. And I got to talk to a cloud, so not all bad.
Darren Thompson (and he alone) sorted out my basic maths error yesterday
"Hi Richard,
I'm sure I'm not the first to tell you this but the relationship between 'madness' and 'funniness' you are talking about would be called an "inversely proportional" one.
And therefore the equation you're looking for would be m = c/f where 'c' is a constant number. Some measurements of funniness and madness are required to work out 'c'. As a professional comedian, naturally I'll leave it up to you to provide these! I'm particularly interested in the units of measurement.
Your loyal nerd,
Darren"
Thanks Darren. I will work on it!
