Tiernan's travels

Two months ago, our resident comic Tiernan Douieb was in bed catching up on DVDs. Has he even got time to sleep these days?

Things have stepped up a gear since my last blog and I’ve once again been travelling all over the place in order to deliver mirth like a comedy postman. I did my first gigs in Scotland outside of the Edinburgh Festival. I’d never done these gigs before as, when I was working in a full-time job, I could never take the time out to head to Scotland for three days. What an idiot I have been: these gigs were so lovely. Edinburgh is a beautiful place too and I could spend ages there, especially outside of festival time when the streets aren’t filled with morons on stilts, 400 flyerers, and people shouting about their new play where Jesus is a doorman to a blues bar and all the women are aliens.

For the first time in ages I was in the right frame of mind to sit down and churn out a ton of writing that I was meant to do ages ago. The down-side to this was that, while I typed, I lost count of how many coffees I had been drinking and spent the afternoon and evening buzzing on a caffeine high with scary breath like the weird maths supply teacher that everyone has to endure for three days of the year at school. How these people keep being re-hired year in, year out – when all they do is shout and smell of coffee – always worried me at the time.

Glasgow was nice too, which was a surprise after constantly hearing it being used as the butt of many a joke. The central area by the station was very smart, clean and didn’t really look like gangland gun and crack territory. I was, however, disappointed by the lack of battered and greasy food. I spent an hour walking around the city one morning in search of a decent fry-up and had to finally settle for a mediocre Starbucks’ panini. There are some stereotypes that I wish the city had lived up to.

Another nice trip I had was gigging in Belfast at the Queens University. Belfast is a great city – it has an excellent atmosphere and audiences are generally lovely. The students at this particular gig were brilliant, if a tad timid. Although I’m sure this may have been caused by the very aggressive MC, who proceeded to do lots of anti-English gags just before he brought me on. I’ve never been so grateful for an Irish first name in my life. I think it gave me four minutes of grace without being chastised for happening to have been born in London.

Most of the other places I’ve been to are little villages or towns that I would never have been to unless I had to work there. It’s not that they are horrible, but being a city boy by heart, the countryside scares me. While many people from outside of London are under the misconception that it is a dangerous place, the countryside for me is scarier. There are no streetlights, no 24-hour shops to keep the place busy, and no crowds pouring out of nightclubs at all hours. Instead it is a dark, frightening place where anything could happen, and hence why murderers always get away with crimes in Midsomer Murders. It’s OK when I have fellow comedians as passengers as I have someone to talk to on the journey, but when I’m on my own it is no fun. The worst is when I start to freak myself out thinking there is someone sitting in the back seat. It’s not actually that scary, but I hate the fact that someone is treating me like a cab driver.

Sadly the low point of this month was when I discovered I had been a victim of London’s criminals when, as I arrived home from Scotland, my girlfriend informed me that our car had been broken into. This was immediately annoying, and I mean annoying rather than upsetting. They didn’t take anything. Not a thing. This is partly because we are not idiots and don’t ever leave anything in the car, but also probably because whatever had been left in the car would have been useless to any thieves. I can’t imagine a bunch of crims trying to sell off half a Haribo packet on the black market. I really hope that they felt gutted when, after making all the effort of breaking into the car, the realized it really was a huge waste of time, and that perhaps now is the time to go on the straight and narrow, and study hard to become an astronaut.

All they left was a distinct lack of window and a lot of mess, which meant that I couldn’t drive it to my gig that night, and instead has to make a last minute expensive train dash. It also meant that, despite the so-called 24-hour window fixing service, our window is currently gaffer taped onto the car, providing a security risk and a truly horrible noise as you go down the motorway. Lloyd Langford and myself discovered this on our way to Hinckley. As we tried to talk, there was what sounded like a giant fly in a can making the most irritating noise on Earth. It reminded me of a much worse version of my brother when he was little and would make those gargling type sounds every time you tried to talk. Those were the times I believed violence was condoned in the household. Although apparently I was wrong. Still, I’d prefer to have to deal with that sort of thing than a murdering farmer in the back of my car.