God reads this Blog. After he read my comments yesterday about there being no spring as yet he provided me, and lots of other people, with a beautiful afternoon in which to drive up to Middlesbrough with the first signs of green on the trees and some daffodils to boot. Well done You. Also, and I thought this bordered on showing off, he made the most brilliant rainbow I have ever seen in my life.
It was a rainbow like no other. Indeed, you could see where in ended, about two fields away. You saw where it met the Earth, and I’ve never seen that before. Unfortunately, that stretch of the A19 is no stopping and there’s no hard shoulder else I would definitely have stopped and gone to get the pot of gold that would have rightfully have been mine. I might have split it with the farmer had he turned up, or it was too heavy to carry all by myself, which probably been the case. Gold weights a great deal. It’s God’s own metal, which is why he puts it at the end of His rainbows and has called if after Him but with an extra ‘l’ in it so people don’t get mixed up.
I can’t get across to you how good this rainbow was, but maybe this will help. I decided, at 70mph, to take a photo of it using my mobile phone. In the rain. On a duel carriageway covered in cones for road works. It was the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done behind the wheel of a car. One of the most dangerous things ANYONE has ever done behind the wheel of a car, surely. Especially as I turned off my windscreen wipers to try and get a shot where they didn’t interrupt the view and then tried to half press the trigger to get the rainbow into focus, all without looking at the road. Utter madness. And the mistake I’d made there, the schoolboy error, is that you can’t focus a camera on light. Or air. I am quite incredibly stupid.
And what if a Policeman had seen me? I’d have been banned from driving for ever. I’ve heard of people getting banned for texting, as they should, but taking photos of a rainbow? Worse.
What if a speed camera or CCTV camera on a bridge had caught this act of atypical lunacy and then sent it to the papers? I’d be on the front page of the inkies tomorrow as an example of the worst driver in the history of the motor car. Think how that girl was (rightly) persecuted by the media for being photographed putting on her make up without holding the steering wheel in her car a couple of weeks ago. This is worse than that.
Trying to take a picture of a rainbow. I ask you. Not only is it the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done in a car, it is far and away the most gay too. I’m not being homophobic, because I’m not, but it is the most… let’s say effeminate thing, then. It’s hopelessly camp. “Oooh! A rainbow! I’ll get a wee snap of that!�
I’d be on the front page banner of the Mirror tomorrow (and who knows, maybe I am) and my friends would be provided with limitless ammunition. Limitless.
So it’s a miracle I got to Middlesbrough but I did. I was early and looked around the town centre, which was dead, and then drove back out to the area the gig was located, in a pub. It’s gig itself is run by a very good company called Funny Bones Comedy who do loads of stand-up events in the North East but this was a relatively new one. 80% women in the audience because Middlesbrough were playing Basel in the UEFA cup tonight and all the blokes were off watching that and not taking pictures of rainbows, like real men.
I went on first and it was tough. They were appreciative, so I’m told, but after every laugh I was back at Square One again, just like in Sale the other week. I really had to dig my heels in and knew they wouldn’t go for lots of it. But they seemed to sort of like me. I was told by the compere, the great John Scott, that exactly the same thing happened to all the comics on the bill a couple of weeks before. But I wasn’t too downhearted, I’d sweated through it. Sometimes it’s good to have to really work.
Nah – what am I saying? It’s obviously better when they just love everything you say.
Drove home in similar torrential conditions to yesterday, God clearly angry with me telling the rainbow story on stage to lots of women in Middlesbrough, and stating to them through a microphone that taking a photo of His creation is like the stereotypical behaviour of gay man. Not that God has a problem with gay men, he made us one and all, but me associating enjoying His rainbows exclusively with gay people, when rainbows are for all, might have irked him.
Anyway it was a desperately bad journey home and I’d done a 300 mile round trip for a very dissatisfying evening’s work. Such is life.
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