Everyone @ Chortle

The 23:15 train from Waterloo to Guildford was rammed full tonight. I was journeying back from a typical Saturday night London double-up - Covent Garden and Chalk Farm, since you ask - and with an early start tomorrow I ran back to get the earliest train I could. There was one seat left on the train when I boarded, and even then there were loads of people standing. No one was taking this seat. Then I saw why.

Sat next to the empty seat was a Muslim man, about my age, with a rucksack, and reading the Qur'an. I'm happy to say I didn't hesitate for a moment before sitting. Not like the prejudiced people standing. "I won't sit next to that terroristy fella, not me. I'll stand here, four feet away - that'll protect from any potential blast." Perhaps it's more that they want to be four feet away from the social embarrassment of stopping a man detonating a bomb. I dunno. For whatever reason, no one wanted to sit next to this guy. I, as I say, didn't pause for a second. Such a moral philandering love-all-the-people social example am I. Or it could be cos there was an old lady coming up behind me, and I knew that if I hesitated, she'd be the one who gets to sit down all journey. No, ma'am - you pester the woman in that seat with orange sticker for her seat. I don't care if she is pregnant.

So I sat next to this avid Qur'an-reader for the 40min journey home. I got some work out, but if I'm honest, I couldn't concentrate on it, cos part of me is thinking, "What if he is a terrorist? I mean he probably isn't. But surely he has all the signs. He keeps fiddling with his rucksack. He's listening to an mp3 player (could be last-minute instrutctions of what buttons to press, I dunno, on a podcast or something). He even had a phone where you have to enter a password to activate it. The clues are there. Most telling of all, he had chosen to read his Qur'an on one of the busiest trains I've ever been on, on a Saturday night at kicking-out time, when every one of the 5 carriages was rammed full of what I like to call 'drunken morons'. It was one of those train journeys where I look around and think, "Yeah, I wouldn't say no to nuking this lot myself."

That train did really contain everything bad about the west. There was gluttony in terms of severe drunkenness; greed in terms of people showing off new phones, trainers, jewellery; pride in terms of some girls over-revelling in their own beauty; lust in terms of so so many lecherous men touching up inebriated women they've just met... Most of the seven deadly sins were represented on tonight's 23:15 service. If my next-door neighbour had reached into his rucksack and pushed a big red button, I could hardly have blamed him.

Despite all of the above, and the prejudices I had (be honest: if you're judging me now, what would you have thought if you'd been sat next to this guy? Particularly when every few minutes he's nervously reach into his big for something I could never see?), I quickly decided he was not a terrorist. Any smart warmonger would realise that this train contained few people that mattered. In many cases they'd be putting them out of their misery. This guy, I had decided, was just a studious religious man, taking solace in his holy book on a Saturday evening's journey home from London.

I glanced over at one point when he brought out another book - a pamphlet translating some bits of the Qur'an into English, and explaining a few points. He noticed my glance, and I sensed a bit of prejudice from his side too now, back at me. Did he think that me glancing over his shoulder was me assuming he was one of Alan Qaeida's cohorts? Cos that's not the case. By now I'd decided he was a good 'un. I was looking at his book now cos I'm interested in theology. Who's the prejudiced one now?

Alright, probably still me. Ultimately when he got off the train, he was nice and polite when I moved for him. I was proved right. He was a good egg. The other passengers still cast judging looks towards him, and were clearly glad he was gone (well the old lady was - it meant she could finally get a seat). Was I right to have terroristish concerns? Especially when the guard ('guard'? he's a ticket collector. He didn't guard anything. He was in the carriage at the rear of the train - he told us so himself. Coward.) told us on the tannoy that we should keep an eye out for anything suspicious. So surely a bit of prejudice is allowable, if he ticks every box in the I-Spy Book of People Who Are Against George Bush. I dunno. Maybe I thought he was a terrorist, but was just lazy enough to want a seat and British enough to not cause a fuss by raising any kind of alarm. Either way, he was not a terrorist. At least not tonight. Although for all I know he's gone away now to hatch some plan to detonate next Saturday's 23:15 from Waterloo to Guildford, tipped over the edge just cos some weird ginger guy kept looking over at him trying to read his book...

As a comedian, if you have a free weekend, you do wonder if you should fill it with things, go away somewhere perhaps, or wait by the phone in case you get a gig offer. Well last week the latter happened, which meant that oh yes I could go away - the gig was in Cyprus.

Never been before, but a lovely place - we arrived in a mini-heatwave, so it was a sweltering (for redheads) 33 degrees. We (myself, Yianni, Brian Higgins and John Mann) were there from Saturday lunchtime till Monday evening, so a lovely few days to relax. The gig was Saturday night, and was hard work but achievable, and it should be hard work to be honest - you need to earn a few days' jolly in the Med. The crowd were lovely but the hurdle was that it was outdoors, just a few metres from the sea. So there are no acoustics, and the laughs go straight upwards. So (a) you can't hear them, to know if you're doing ok, and (b) the audience can't hear each other laughing, so they become less likely to laugh out loud (laughter at gigs seems to be a communal thing - it's often all or nothing).

But we all had lovely gigs, proved by the drinks we were bought after. We were really well looked after over there, and the next day and a half was basically us swimming, having some light bites, and generally chewing the fat. It also proved the perfect background for reading my new book - Stephen King's The Gunslinger (first of his nine-part fantasy epic which is his attempt to write a book longer than Lord of the Rings).

Worth saying that this was the Turkish part of Cyprus, although we landed in the Greek part. I never realised just how big an elephant it is in the room that is Cyprus. They really don't get on. There's a massive Turkish flag on the mountains on the Turkish side, painted onto rocks, which I hear were turned over in the middle of the night a few years ago on the eve of the Greek side's national day. Now that's rubbing it in.

It does make things very confusing. On the Greek side, prices are in Euros, but also written in Cypriot pounds, while locals get used to the newly-introduced Euro. Over the border, it's Turkish Lira (aka YTL), but you can usually also pay in British Pound Sterling too. But they'll still ask for it in YTL, even if they know you're paying pounds. eg:

HIM: That's 7.50 please.
ME: Here's five pounds.
HIM: Which means you get 50 YTL cents change.

...while up the road, the same thing would cost 6 euros, but have a sign next to it saying that's about £4.50 CYP. One thing - four different prices. I'm so glad Yorkshire hasn't declared independence and introduced the Yorkshire Lira, with a Lancastrian Dollar down the round being worth half of the previous number you thought of, equivalent in Mancunian Euros to double the Brummie Ruble.

Thanks to my own sheer stupidity I am crippled in a minor way this week, writing this blog from the sofa with one very swollen left foot up on the coffee table much to everyone in Starbucks' disgust. I'm not really in Starbucks, but I wish I was as that joke would be significantly funnier if true. Instead sadly I am just at home alone and two cats are looking at me like I am worthless.

They have a wonderful way of staying very still and staring right at you as though you are smaller than many of the things they kill. Earlier today I shooed a big ginger cat out of the house because he was harassing our two little kittens. This seems to happen on a regular basis and I have begun to think that he just has no idea how to flirt. He reminds me of a kid at school who thought that by playfully hitting women that they would like them. Instead they thought he was a wife beater and kept away. And now this large furry ginger beast is feared by little Rosie and Bella. So I hissed at him, using cat styles to make him leave, and he looked at me like I was a massive loser, scratched the aforementioned swollen foot, which was already swollen at the time and made me swear, and he pootled out of the flat in his own time. Then my two cats who should have seen me as a hero of catdom, just gave me the condescending expression that the world gives first round X-Factor weirdos. Yes, I have been beaten by cats today. Times are low.

The foot in question is swollen because I dropped a two year old diabetic syringe into it. Why I was carrying a two year old syringe I'm not sure, I had just randomly decided through trying to avoid doing anything else, that it was probably time to throw them away. On the journey to the bin, one fell and landed vertically onto my barefoot. At the time, I thought, how nuts, but how cool am I as I didn't flinch and pulled the offending item out feeling like the Unbreakable King. Two days, a tetanus jab and six doses of the biggest anti-biotic I've ever seen I am not a happy man.

Sitting on a sofa leaves you with little to do but write and this morning more sketches towards our ever nearing show are looming. There are also a couple of new gags for my stand-up set which is nice. Also my left foot is now so big I can finally wear a single clown shoe properly, and the final plus point is that I can drink with these anti-biotics, and I'm off to a friend of my girlfriend's wedding this weekend, with lots of people I don't know. What a perfect excuse to sit down and drink till Sunday. Finally I get to be the odd limping drunkard in the corner that exists at every wedding. That's right kids, dreams can come true. I ought to carry more dangerously infected metal items around more often. Anyone have a rusty ice pick I can juggle with?

Haven't blogged for a bit - been away on the canals. Four of us on a big 10-berth boat - a lovely week with great sun, but not the restful break it could have been given that the minimum you need to man a boat like that (with locks) is 4 or 5, so we were all on duty all the time. And my, I've never known hay fever like it on them boats. For the entire seven days, all of us were mid-sneeze. Some tasty canalside pub grub too. Mmm.

So that was the last break before the final push of Edinburghian preparations. I've had 3 previews in the last few days, and the show is coming together nicely. At the minute I'm mostly previewing the speaky bits - the jokes, stories, etc - with the complicated setpieces (that I stupidly and over-ambitiously like to do) to be slotted in when I can be arsed to sit down in front of Powerpoint for a day or four. This year's show potentially features a spoof karaoke video, me on the ukulele (which I have yet to learn), plus two other songs to backing-tracks. Having never sung as part of my stand-up act, this is all a little daunting. And Edinburgh is but 6 weeks away now. Cripes.

I picked up my Edinburgh fringe guide today (available from the Time Out office in London), and was pleasantly surprised to see my 1/4 page advert is nice and near the front - just 3 pages into the comedy section. It was also nice to see that my text entry is at the top of the page it's on, so that's a slight bonus. Every little helps when you're up against every living comic. And my, there are a lot of them. I read through to halfway through the Bs, and that took half an hour. This is the one bad thing about the Fringe Guide - it's almost depressing to see that much comedy will be in one place. Which is the opposite effect that comedy should have. But no city needs this much comedy. No city can give enough punters to the number of comedy shows in the fringe guide. There will be a lot of shows peformed just to the technician this year, and I just hope mine isn't one of them.

I'll post my press release here as a blog soon - in the mean time if you fancy coming to a preview, or the show itself in Edinburgh, then my website www.paulkerensa.com has details of where and when. If you don't, then poo to you with knobs on.

Please note: Not a post about weaving tools in Scotland.

I've just returned home after a top night at Fat Tuesday watching Michael Fabbri and Jon Richardson's ace Edinburgh previews (both of which I highly recommend!) , and the Edinburgh excitement has finally started kicking in. This is also heightened by the first Tea and Cake preview show that we did last night, which was the first step in cementing August's major happening for the comedy world, and the arrival of the Fringe Brochure last week. Ah, the Fringe Brochure. A landmark moment in every year where I open it up and go 'wow, I spent several gigs wages just to put that tiny blurb just there'. Priceless. Or actually, pricey.

Knowing its approaching gives me that odd feeling. Somehow its a combination of sheer fear, knowing that day in day out I'll be doing two shows and worrying about the pressures and critiquing that the festival brings. At the same time, I'm damn excited knowing that I get to spend a whole month doing what I enjoy and drinking with people I like. Its almost like uni again, in that there is this close knit community of comedians and comedy types who all actually socialise for once, and not just in a car on the way back from Wales where talking and service stations are the only way to pass the time. At the same time, its not like uni, because you don't have to do any essays. Therefore, its much better than uni. Although you don't get a grant/loan for it. Well you can get a loan. Oh god this is another metaphor that really doesn't work.

Our sketch preview on Monday went well-ish. The audience were 99.9% friends and family which was nice and helpful as they are the most likely to be brutally honest. There's nothing quite like the verbal cold shower of your relatives telling you it sucks. Thankfully they didn't. Mainly because they weren't there. But everyone that was enjoyed it. There's still loads to change and work on and that for me, is the sort of exciting bit that will keep the show fresh until Edinburgh. Once it gets there of course it will stagnate and I'll be sick of it, but until then its all fun.

And what will this year's fringe hold? Well I hope it will bring some forward motion in the career lobby, but mostly I hope its gonna be loads of fun. I'm prepping my liver with small starting amounts of booze, and trying to lessen my sleep just so I can survive as long as possible up there without any. Two shows a day this year, so that'll be more of a slog than last year, but I'm feeling on the ball. Bring it on fringe, I'm ready. Even if my shows aren't.

On a different note, I had a moment that cheered me up tonight. On Saturday, I MC'd the late show at the Komedia. I love that gig, but I was knackered and the audience were too. They were also drunk. Very very drunk. The combination of both of these things made it all a bit of a slog for me. The worst moment being when I got them all to give their last burst of energy for the headliner, the brilliant Danny Bhoy, and the applause ran out of steam before he made it on stage at 00.15am. That's not a great crowd, but also I felt I had failed in the main purpose of MCing, which was to keep them all going.

However tonight, a couple that popped along to Fat Tuesday confronted me in the interval by asking if I was gigging in Brighton on Saturday. They then proceeded to tell me that I had had them in tears of laughter and it was their best night out in ages. Instantly, a grateful grin appeared on my face that hasn't gone away since. Yey for the audience!

This last two weeks, I've been treated like a celebrity, been chased by dogs, attacked in the street and learned something about criminal damage, on top of that I've been asked to do Glastonbury.

Also I've found out I'm quite good at poker.

Oh and my mum has started reading this blog.

Hopefully I'll be back online in the next few days to explain this weird little post, there's loads of stuff to talk about.

I love you all

BB xXx

Back from three days on the road, with hotels courtesy of laterooms.com. And the moral of this tale is: 'You get what you pay for'. The £60 converted dairy in Romsey nr Southampton was lovely - complete with own snooker table, lovely breakfast, free wifi, charming old wooden decor, horse outside the window, that sort of thing. Then there's the £20 room in Bournemouth. The polar opposite. The doors wouldn't lock, so I even took my laptop to the bathroom (on the next floor down) when I went for a shower. Although I didn't need to worry about security it turns out, because I was the only person in the entire building. Not even staff - they live down the road.

But it's ok - when away like that for gigs, you can while away time with a DVD or two. Which I ran out of, but handily the 'hotel' is right opposite a massive Asda, so I was finally persuaded to invest in season 3 of Prison Break. Not as good as the first two seasons, but needs must when alone and bored in Bournemouth.

The other part of the weekend was the wedding of my good friend Rachel, to Mark, who is now also a good friend. A lovely do at a barn in Bicester. Really great day, with tear-jerking speeches, very nice surroundings, a good hog roast in the evening, yum... Of course since I am now planning my own wedding, I was guilty of making the odd note or two. Only in a good way, of course - "Ooh, pudding takes 20 minutes...", "A cake that's half chocolate, half fruitcake - nice...", "Hogroast served in the evening at about 10ish - good touch..." That's right. It was all about food. I tell you one thing about my wedding: no one's going hungry.

For the first time ever I headlined a gig tonight. It was not quite what was intended and the gig was just a very nice charity gig, but it was my first headline spot nonetheless and I bloody well enjoyed it. Yeah I said bloody like a posh Englishman, what are you going to do about it punk?

There is something about the headlining spot that is at the same time both alluring and frightening, like Jessica Alba with an axe. People expect you to be the best act of the night, which is uber-pressure but also seem to give the act a slightly easier ride as they are more relaxed knowing that what they are going to see is going to be good. In the same way the first spot of the night has excellent pros and terrible cons. Pros - you can go home early, you can talk about any topic and it wont have already been said (unless the MC's said it). Cons - if the audience are not warmed up properly then your set can essentially be taking a bullet for the team and if you screw up you can set the precedent for the whole night. Basically, you should always try and go in the middle, although then it can be presumed at some clubs that you are the open spot and people sod off for a fag. The more I type this blog I realise that perhaps there is not a single part of the comedy evening that is 100% guaranteed fun. Wow, comedy can suck.

But mostly it doesn't. Unless of course you do, and if you do, stop it or get better. Grr. Aside from those wonderful words of wisdom, I think the headliner does get the best spot of the night. Tonight as they introduced me as the headliner I got more applause than any had done all night, just because of presumption of my ability. They were wrong, but it was nice of them to assume. I was meant to be the penultimate act, but the headliner had a mini-crisis and had to leave early, so I followed him. I wasn't entirely happy about this for several reasons. Firstly, the gig didn't seem great as I arrived and the audience had talked through most of the acts before us - part of the problem of a no entry ticket charity gig in a student bar. Secondly, I would have to follow the headliner which for the audience would be somewhat like being given a glass of champagne followed by a flat can of Tizer.

Yet strangely despite all this it went really well and the audience were really lovely. So well and so lovely infact that I also combined this first headlining spot with my first ever encore, which was another set of problems all together mainly because I had exhausted a load of material. I did however manage to pull it off because I'm super bad.

I got home after the gig and immediately wrote 5 minutes of new stuff, 3 of which won't work. Its amazing how forcing your brain to churn more material out, gets it working double speed and creativity ensues. It also explains why, by sitting on my arse playing Mario Kart all day, I am nowhere near writing an hour show anytime soon.

I shall end this blog with a moment of cheekiness. Someone gave me the idea to do this, so I've done it, and its working better than I thought. If you are a kind soul and understand the financial pressures of the Edinburgh Festival please do take part and not only will I think you are wonderful in every way, but karma wont hit you in the face which means there is less chance of the UK seeing an earthquake anytime soon, according to brainiac Sharon Stone.

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