Last night, I was walking home across an Adelaide park at 4.00am and I just could not walk any more, so I crashed under a tree and went to sleep. I woke at 9.00am to the sound of monkeys. Ad someone flown me to Borneo in the night? It turned out I was next to Adelaide zoo.
The sun was already starting to roast and I was so hot all I could manage was to roll into deeper shade. It only got hotter and around midday just as I thought I was going to be found there as a dedicated husk a man with a push chair left the path to come check on me. “Water please” was all I could manage. He handed me a babies bottle and I sucked greedily at the teat. I tried to hand it back to him but he didn’t seem to want it. I managed to stagger out of the park at and get to the nearest air conditioning to cool down which, appropriately enough, was at the hospital. They also do the cheapest breakfast in town.
The man whose house I should have been staying at – Matthew – is coming to my gig tonight with a blind date. That is very brave I think, especially as he has told me a great story that I will repeat to the audience. Here it is:-
A couple of Christmases ago, he is wandering up to the bottle shop and he meets two girls. He gets chatting and invites them back to his house. He has intimate relations with one of these girls and then, the next day, they tell him that they live in a care home.
He drops them off and foolishly gives them some cash. The next he hears about them is in the local paper.
It seems, with cash in their pocket, they do not go back to the home. They go out on the lash. And one of them is found dead. Murdered. (Not the one he got intimate with.) The next thing is the police turn up to question him. They ask him to let them know if he hears from the other girl, as they are worried about her.
A couple of days later, he is driving along and sees her in the street. He stops, picks her up and takes her home. He chats to her and she agrees that he should ring the police. They come around almost instantly, which surprises Matthew, but not when they handcuff the girl and tell him that she did the murder.
So I am living with a guy who diddled a murderer.
I met a murderer once at the premiere for the movie Killer Bitch, which I introduced at the Curzon Mayfair cinema in London. The so-called Black Widow did 28 years for murdering three husbands and claiming on the insurance. While inside, she was Moors Murderer Myra Hindley‘s hairdresser.
On the week she got out of jail, she married a man that she met on day release.
The Killer Bitch premiere was full of assorted hoodlums and fighters including Stormin Norman Buckland – bare knuckle boxing champion of England – and, taking up the entire back row, a motorcycle gang that kills Hells Angels for fun. In-between was the football hooligan that Donal McIntyre put away, fighters, gangsters and assorted criminals.
My opening line on stage was “You are all a bunch of poofs!”
I have never raced to the punchline so fast… which was that they were poofs compared to the lovely old man who had married the Black Widow on the week of her release from prison.
