Comedy and column inches out of misery...

Wrote some comedy sketches. Myself and M had promised to write some for someone we know for performance by some young people. I was cold, tired, had the remnants of Swine Flu gnawing away at me, was bereft of ideas, couldn't think of any funny lines. Naturally, they turned out great.

I was in a pub the other day and, laid on a table, with nothing and nobody else in sight, was a newspaper. I realised, too late, when I'd taken it back to my table, that it was a copy of the Daily Mail. It was the edition, I'd find out much later in the day, containing Jan Moir's nasty assault on the memory of Stephen Gately. I picked up the paper and went and sat down with it. Ten minutes passed by and I'd read the back pages when a man tapped me on the shoulder. "Did you take that paper? The one from that table over there?" We looked. The table was still empty, with no obvious sign that anyone was or had been sitting there. I explained that I thought the paper in question had been abandoned. "It's my paper. Why did you take it?" I explained again and made some quip about the horror of the Daily Mail and the poor state of its page layout. "I'll have it back now." I'd already given it back to him before he'd said this. He was a rather odious man. A typical Daily Mail reader (I felt tainted having been near the paper for those ten minutes) - that paper was in his every movement and utterance. He shuffled off but didn't sit down and read but went over to another couple sitting across the way to tell them what had happened. "He," said the man, in fully earshot of me, "just took the paper. Can you believe it?" If I'd realised it was a copy of the Daily Mail I wouldn't actually have bothered touching it. And if only he'd known (although he reads the DM every day, so probably did know) what he'd relished fighting to have back in his possession - Jan Moir's nasty ramblings. Yuk.