To Bee or not to Bee

I remember Michael Caine once telling the story of filming The Swarm in the late 1970’s, it was a filthy experience he said. Most people who’ve seen it would probably agree, “My new ‘ouse in Hollywood needed carpets”, was Caine’s creative process behind the decision to appear in the film but that wasn’t what he meant by filthy. Despite previous films being made in the uncomfortable jungles of Malaya, the arid plains and harsh mountains of India and even the Elephant & Castle in London, Caine’s abiding memory of The Swarm was when the bees were first released from their hive on the first day of ‘bee shooting’. Millions and millions of the things were suddenly free, ready for their big moment in front of the cameras and they all, en masse, defecated on the film crew and assorted Hollywood glitterati.
“Bees, you see,” recounted Caine later on, “never shit on their own doorstep.”
If only horses had the same level of domestic hygiene and decorum.
Look I know the score, you have animals you have to put up with the attendant ‘produce’, believe me as parents of three growing boys Natalie and I are well aware of the hygiene challenges. The constant smell, the incessant low rumbling and muffled farting of young boys followed by the inevitable giggling, and the seeming impossibility of actually urinating in the toilet forms a constant backdrop to our house. The dogs defecate, as dogs do, in a free range, ad hoc manner, the cats either in their litter tray or next door, the hens generally in their coop, the goats whenever I look at them but the horses...
I didn’t realise just how stupid an animal a horse actually is. I’ve seen War Horse and this noble, heroic creature is about as close to the two dolts we have as Katie Price is to Audrey Hepburn, from a distance the same species but entirely different in almost every conceivable way. A certain amount of leeway has to be given to Junior who is still struggling with some – still as yet undiagnosed – wasting disease and so when the latest attempt of giving him a boost was to increase his feed drastically one expects a manure windfall, but there’s a time and a place surely.
Two enormous bales of hay arrived and were deposited in the field and they – Junior and Ultime – tucked in. And then they kept tucking in. In fact they very rarely tucked out, occasionally leaving the ‘Eat As Much As You Want’ hay buffet in order to go and get a drink. But that was the only time they left the table as it were. After a few hours it became clear that bowel evacuation was simply not a good enough reason to interrupt their extended meal, nor going for a wee and so after a few days their pristine bales of hay, which had been neatly placed by the hedge, actually looked like a food fight in a particularly rancid public toilet. Natalie would go out every day for a week to try and sift the horse dung from the food, a futile job as the horses themselves wouldn’t budge and would continue eating and egesting at the same time like a sordid take on the ‘Boy in the Fountain’ statue in Brussels.
It was only a week later when the horses finally realised that what they were now eating was their own matter and like pampered royalty at the salad bar in Pizza Hut, lifted their haughty noses and walked away from it, a resentful look on their faces as if to say, ‘How do you expect us to eat this muck?’
I was watching this absurd carry on from my office where, while the boys are at school at least, I’ve been locked in battle with a project that even now, even in its infancy, I’m regretting for the sheer lunacy of what I’ve taken on. In early November I will be performing my first stand up set in French, the fact that as yet I have to write the set, translate what I have written or even – and this could be the killer – learn French, is causing something of a hindrance in the confidence department.
There are a number of reasons I booked the gig in the first place, firstly I’m convinced, sorry wasconvinced, that actually I am fluent in the language but like a stubborn cork on an old bottle of wine my linguistic talents just needed an extra push to become unblocked.
I was wrong, I know nothing.
I also thought that setting myself a deadline, which the show is, would mean I’d knuckle down and do the required work immediately and thoroughly. Fat chance. I have lived with myself for 42 years now and yet still apparently operate on a level of quite farcical self delusion.
I also had it in my head, in my head being shorthand for ‘wildest dreams’ or ‘drunken blatherings’, that I could become proficient enough to do some gigs actually in France. That by having some foot in the nascent French stand up circuit I might not have to travel quite so far, or be away for quite so long.
I am now doing the work: writing, translating with the help of a clearly worried Natalie and learning my lines, my put down lines and my ‘improvised riffs’. It’s possibly the most daunting gig I’ve ever taken on, even more daunting than my very first gig even, because now there’s so much further to fall, and to my mind at stake.
I love France. It’s not just home to me, it’s my refuge, my bolt-hole and I’ve always liked the fact that, largely, I’ve kept my job as a stand up comedian entirely separate from my home life here. I may be out of the loop in terms of much of what goes on on the UK comedy circuit, but I think that’s a good thing, I’ve not been ground down by it like some of my peers who have no escape from it at all.
And now, here I am fretting away at a script I don’t even truly understand in order to bring stand up, my job, even closer to home.

I am definitely more horse than bee.
NB I have done some gigs in France before, though not in French. The whole sorry debacle is documented here.