Missing in Action as usual…

Am so sorry my blog has suffered by being so bloody fucked up busy. I lie in bed and imagine I am writing my blog, I have all these great things to tell you, then wake up, ignore my laptop and jump on the tube to the next gig.

In my defence, I have written two articles for newspapers back in Scotland and have been gigging like a nutter, no excuses for ignoring my blog…I KNOW!

So here is a rundown. I had a wonderful time performing my play in Oxford on Tuesday last week. John Fleming (my Manager) and I caught the bus up to Oxford early and we wandered the beautiful tree lined buildings and streets.
I cannot begin to tell you how amazing that city looks in the weak winter sun. We went to Christchurch University and strolled around the grounds. The place is so startlingly awesome. Imagine being a student there? It made me wish I had was 18 again and instead of getting married in Glasgow’s East End I was studying in that ancient and gorgeous city. It wasn’t something that was considered when I was a teenager, going to Oxford? No…. going to prison…YES…getting pregnant…YES…getting a flat in Oxford to study law…NO!
I stood on those cobbled streets and watched all these wonderful young people, ride bikes, chat in groups and lunch beneath 14th Century Monuments and secretly wished I had had those opportunities….but then again maybe I would not be me now if I had been them then….does that make sense?

I suppose knowing that those educated and privileged people had taken time out of their night and paid to see ME perform a play that I had wrote did give me a sense of wonderment that I secretly enjoyed! I am not an uneducated failure after all!

The wonderful and talented actor Beth brought her boyfriend to come along and watch and that made it lovely for me, you have no idea how it feels to have a professional actor watch your stuff….so nice, I love her for supporting me like that.

I took some nice pics of Oxford and will post them soon.
John and I caught the late night bus back to London and husband was awake and had tea on the table for us arriving at 1am. What a guy!

Oxford has become my regular haunt, as on Friday I was back there to compere the Jongleurs club in the city. I caught the 5pm train from Paddington on my own, IPod at the ready; coffee in hand and instead of having a leisurely journey to my fav town….I was beaten near to death by the scrambling rampage of fat suited businessmen trying to get home for the weekend to their stone cottages and country piles in Oxford.

I have never seen so many badly behaved professional men in my life…..politicians and bankers by day, fucking fat rugby tackling passenger kickers at the weekend…I shoved my way onto the train but lo and behold it looked like a scene from those awful trains of death that shunted prisoners from camp to camp in the Second World War! I was imagining me sitting there listening to music and leisurely sipping tea reading a newspaper….OH NO! I was crushed with my face into the back of a fat man wearing a damp duffel coat outside a toilet in the corridor of the train….if they transported lambs like this, the public would have an outcry and vegetarian militant lesbians wearing oatmeal cardigans reciting placenta poetry would throw themselves on the track in protest. Why do we suffer this horror?
So I got myself into the first class carriage.

It was like a Gordon Brown convention, loads of smart dressed overly coifed men in cashmere coats and bright pink ties….the kind of men you suspect are living with their boyfriends in Dolphin Square and work in Westminster and go home to their bored wives in Oxford at the weekend. Ok I know that’s a generalisation but when they saw this scuzzy frazzled Glaswegian sit near them, they visibly grimaced. How dare scum enter their streamline clean first class carriage?

I ignored them; they peeked over pink Financial Times broadsheets at my damp face and frizzy hair. The ticket man came waddling down (do they ever do anything other than waddle?)
“Your ticket is not first class miss, you are not allowed in here without a first class ticket” he shouted as he looked at my crumpled rail ticket.

The men in pink ties smirked as a group, grey haired with shiny faces, all enjoying the one moment in their week…..the poor person had been caught, oh how they knew I never held a first class ticket….they sat in combined silence and nodded the nod to each other that rich people do when a common person has stepped into their oak smoked- cashmere-leather briefcase world without permission!

I looked at the ticket man and said “Look mate, there are NO seats on this train and I am not paying £18 to stand in a fat man’s armpit outside a toilet in a corridor for an hour, so I am taking this seat, I refuse to be dangerously rattled about on this shaky shit train, so deal with it”

“I can call the police and have you charged” he snapped with bristling authority.

The newspapers moved, eyes peeked out, Blackberry’s were ignored, laptops were clicked shut for better viewing purposes, creaseless shirts on well fed bodies leaned nearer, no one spoke….silence in the First Class carriage.

“Look, I really don’t give a flying fuck if you call the Queen, call the FBI, call your mother, I am not moving, I refuse to be treated like a refugee begging for air on your shit train, so jail me…I am stand up comic and its all material as far as I am concerned, I cant imagine all these nice politicians and bankers are going to appreciate you stopping the train and getting the police on for a woman who wanted a seat, do you?”

The ticket man smiled and moved on. I won.

Just as I settled into my warm comfortable seat, the crispy white shirted man leaned across and spoke loudly “You know madam; you have to pay the correct fare”
I looked him straight in the eye, I was aware his compatriots were staring and I said “No mate YOU have to pay the full fare, I don’t, I argue with people and stand my ground and you have probably paid enough for both of us, so thank you, now please don’t interrupt me anymore, I want to listen to some hard core rap on my IPod”

I don’t know what the collective noun is for a bunch of fat rich business men but I think it’s ‘wankers’.

London is great, the gigs have been awesome -husband has been good, annoying but good…we go home tomorrow and I am looking forward to seeing Ashley. Talk soon.