January 17-21st: Mussels, yachts and Gheff’s weapon

The beauty of the job is that you often get to gig abroad. Normally the gigs are lovely and if you go with lovely people it can feel like a holiday with a couple of gig thrown in. When I accepted these gigs on the French Riviera I thought it would be hot, because even though France is quite close to London, I’m a complete moron. It was actually t-shirt weather some days so my retarded geographical knowledge paid off to some extent.

I went with Paul McCaffrey and Stephen Grant, both excellent comedians and both excellent value. As Stephen had brought his wife Lucy (also lovely) with him Paul and I spent a dangerously large amount of time with one another; it wouldn’t have been inappropriate if I’d proposed to him on the last day. We were performing to ex-pat’s who mainly worked on yachts with the odd person owning a yachts. The owners were the hardest people to make laugh because there is not much they can relate to: if I went “you know when you’re on a train” they’d be thinking “nope”. With most of the gigs being at Irish bars and most of them allowing us free drinks Paul and I spent a lot of the time being Prince Naseem Hammered.

A few amusing incidents happened but the one and only I have to retell is about my encounter with a French man called Gheff. At 2am in yet another Irish bar me Paul, Nick and Ollie (the 2 guys running the gigs) befriended a random French man called Gheff purely because he called a Canadian man a tosser. Due to the fact that we all thought the same bloke was a tosser we assumed Gheff was not one. How wrong we were. Alarm bells should have rung when we noticed he was sporting a “Kickers” jumper, something only football hooligans and children wear. We walked with this French spy to another bar till about 4am and as we left he gave me a hug. This made me think he was definitely not a tosser. How wrong I was. Gheff then ran away very quickly with my mobile phone. Despite the potential dangers me and Paul gave chase, after 10 metres Paul ran out of breath, but it’s the thought that counts. All I had racing through my mind was that I didn’t want to set up one of those Facebook groups saying “numbers please”. After about 10 minutes I caught up with him in a park. Instead of punching him I shouted, “this is the last night of my holiday you’re ruining it!” I eventually managed to wrestle it off him.

I ran off and rung Paul, who didn’t believe it was me calling despite my name coming up on his phone. He drunkenly thought Gheff was such a git that he was ringing everyone in my phone to brag about robbing me. As the four of walk back to the hotel, stopping to get a cheeky can on the way, we discuss what a dick Gheff is and how he was lucky all 4 of us weren’t there. Then in a way you couldn’t write Gheff appear in front of us going “It’s me Gheff, what’s happening?” I’m there going “what’s happening? You robbed me you prick”. Ollie then without thinking ran in windmilling connecting precisely 0 times before Gheff ran away.
The weirdest feature of this whole story isn’t anything to do with Gheff’s Houdini-like reappearance; it’s the fact that for some unknown reason I have a photo on my phone of him urinating on a wall. I have to me the only human being in the world who has a photo’s of his mugger’s buried treasure on my phone. I wanted to report him to the police for the funniest police line up of all time. I tried to upload this photo to Facebook but it appears it now has penis recognition software so removed it before could even publish it. Gheff is the only criminal in the world who now needs to buy a knob disguise.

I know this story didn’t happen between 9am and 5pm but I think I’m allowed to bend the rules on this occasion.

Moral of the story: don’t befriend someone just because they call someone a tosser.