Just as all good things must come to an end, and all suffering must cease, and what goes up does, invariably, come down (except for Spaceship Voyager and the crap Beagle craft), the things that scare us do eventually come to pass.

Dying. Burying our loved ones. Grey hairs. Erectile dysfunction. The Edinburgh Fringe. Being eaten by monsters. Alright, I MAY escape being eaten by monsters, but the Fringe is awfully, awsomely real. I’m going up tomorrow.

This year I ignored the last-second demon voices which whisper “Rewrite your entire show!” in your ear. Last year the voices said “Your show is not silly enough! Silly it up a bit!” And I said “OK, I’ll make my nephew dress up as a huge rabbit and have him interupt me every ten minutes!” And the demon voices said “Yes, that is a very good idea. There are not enough young men dressed as rabbits at the Edinburgh Fringe. You will get an award for best use of lapine costume. Probably.”

But no, not this time. I’m sticking to the script; thoroughly tried and road-tested. Full of stuff about ghosts, religion, the existence of God, torture, abuse vs neglect, the ridiculousness of existence and the sheer, life-affirming joy felt by the 13-year-old boy as he discovers his first huge stack of pornography. The comedy stuff, in short, that I live and breathe. It’ll be ace. If I can go to bed.

Strangely, an odd sort of rigor mortis has taken hold. I’ve sat here watching Wright Across America, which nobody possessed of a standard set of senses would ever, ever do. Now I’m watching the British Touring Car Championship, which is like Nascar in the car park of an old people’s home. What am I doing? Go to bed, you fuckwit! I think it’s like, when I was six, I wanted to go to bed as early as pos on Dec 24th, so that Christmas would get here quicker. This is just the opposite. The dawn of the Fringe is the Anti-Christmas. In fact, for the young and anxious comic, it is all our Antichristmases come at once.

Bring on the monsters!!!

This summer we are having festival overdose. When I was little we didn’t have festivals, we had fetes. Or sometimes they were called fairs, or gymkhanas. It depended on who was organising the sorry collection of craft stalls, tombola buckets and superannuated donkeys.

I used to love the lucky dip, until I went to the East Goscote school fete, where I had the unluckiest dip any child ever had. The kid in front of me, I jest not, won a brass viking warrior holding a battleaxe. No, really. He plunged his hand into the sand and sawdust, and he pulled out a 30cm-tall metal figurine, shiny and with just a touch of verdigris, wrapped in tissue paper. Who the fuck put that in the lucky dip?? Needless to say the child was pleased with himself and I, awaiting my turn, was glowing with anticipation. But what did I get? A small bar of nougat. It had been wrapped in tissue paper too and, this proving wholly insufficient, it was encrusted with sand and sawdust. Mother wouldn’t let me eat it. The whole business was exceedingly sordid.

After that, all I wanted to do at fetes was smash plates. I didn’t want to win anything. I didn’t want to ride on anything. I didn’t want to buy anything. I wanted to give my 10p to the sallow man at the Smash the Crockery stall, and have him give me five big, flinty bits of rock. And I wanted to hurl the rocks at the crockery. And I wanted to carry on doing this until I’d spent the last month’s pocket money. Oh, it was heaven. I was from a beige home filled with whimsy collectables and Lladro; any excitement you ever felt had to be stifled and suppressed lest it put a chip in a saucer. There was nothing like watching all that white earthenware die like the oppressive pampered china shite it was. My friend’s brother, being older, could visit the shooting gallery. The gun, aimed the wrong way, would happily take your nose off, and it did terrible things to the tea sets at the end of the range (I wonder where all this crockery came from, and why there is no chronic shortage of it today). 

Now, of course, children are officially evil, and they smash the house up all day long. The parents don’t even look up from teaching the bull terrier to use a flick knife (it says in my Daily Express) and, even if they need new plates they buy them off a Chinese plate counterfeiter using money ripped off of the DSS. So I don’t suppose there’s any continuing need for a Smash the Crockery stall, this being the general state of play.

Still, there’s no need for the Urban Green Fair. I mean - just look at the flyer!- it’s got a “social justice zone”. A “peak oil” edutainment zone. It’s got sustainable transport and energy and climate change-themed fun. No! No! No! No! No! It’s not right! Or rather it IS right, in the most po-faced and excruciating way. It’s no wonder kids become violent. I mean, you’re promised a fair - a fair, for goodness sake! -  and all you get is a solar-powered interactive game that teaches you about the petrochemical industry? Give me a fucking rock, mother.

I know I’m in the minority here, but IF the earth is doomed, well… let’s keep a stiff upper lip about it and not scare the poor bloody kids. They can worry about it if they duck all those bullets and knives and lardy burgers to reach 18. Let them have an alien invasion zone, a monster truck zone and a machine gunning the crockery stall. Believe me, with a properly violent fair we won’t have to take kids to hospitals to see what weapons do to people. Not if they’re allowed to see what rocks do to plates.

Wither goest thou, comedy pilgrim? Do you make for Edinburgh, by way of the Unreliable Virgin? Do you seek the true faith? Or are you just going to get pissed and “have a laugh”?

I ask because I’ve just been reading The Comedians by Trevor Griffith. It was recently performed in New York as a sort of time-capsule curiosity of 1975 Northern England, but I doubt that the English will ever see it again. For me, it recalls the ugliest part of our national inheritance. I refuse to own it. The jolly racism, the wife-swapping gags, the bow ties, the break for pies. Telling any attractive woman en route to the loo that her bum looks like two boiled eggs in a hankie: it never happened. Amritsar, the Tasmanian Genocide, the potato famine – yes, that was us. But the 1970s Club Circuit? It’s all a lie.

Each of the play’s six comedians is preparing to perform in a pub before a talent scout. They’ve all honed their act to knife-point, except Price, who’s really “edgy”. In the end five of the comics bottle it, discarding any clever stuff and turning into Jim Davidson the moment the spotlight hits. But Price is different. He just gets on stage and beats up a shop dummy. The talent scout calls him a maniac; his peers think he’s a nob; the audience hate him, but the comedy course teacher sobs that it was exhilarating, and that he admired its “truth” - in spite of his debilitating humanist-liberalist nightschool-teacher ethics. Lo! Here is the first prophecy: the birth of the anticomedian; the coming of the Fringey spirit. Seven years later a star twinkled in the east; Alexei Sayle climbed onstage; Bobby Davro was told there was no room for “his sort of thing” at the Comedy Inn.

It is the lessons of Price the Baptist that guide the cerebral comedian. The reason why The Comedians is not performable today is that, since 1975, everything has changed while nothing has altered. Boundaries, tastes, targets have shifted, but The People remain as predictable in their hunger for meat and two comedy veg as ever they were; as unlikely to commit acts of revolution or demand something challenging to go with their shots of Mystique at midnight. The pressure, just days before the Fringe starts, to slip a wanking joke into a dry spot; a juicy bit about sat navs just before the conclusion – it’s as irresistible to us as racism was to the Griffiths five. We know the drunks will like it, but… do we play to The People, or do we play to The Truth? Mao told us that The People are The Truth, but Mao did not do stand-up.

The great thing about Edinburgh is that it’s the Jerusalem of the comedy faith (it’s also holy to the Thespians, of course, but we’ll kick them out and put a wall up one of these days). If you have anything new to say, this is the hotbed of lost pilgrims to say it to. It is still the place where new messiahs are recognised and so, for those about to bin perfectly good jokes in favour of a spot of mannequin-bashing – I salute you.

So everyone wants Max Mosely to resign for having a Nazi orgy. Someone in F1 compared it to the revelation in Austria of the secret past of Kurt Waldheim.

Well, not really. I can see why it’s important for the General Secretary of the UN not to be a Nazi. I can also see why it’s important for a politician not to be a Nazi. I can even see, up to a point, why the head honcho of something as elitist, wasteful and contemptuous of the common good as Formula One shouldn’t be a Nazi. But I will never, ever understand why an orgy can’t be Nazi.

Nazi uniforms still have a place in society. Not, we hope, at Royal fancy dress parties, but certainly in war films. In The Sound of Music. In Mel Brooks’ productions. And yes, in the sphere of sexual titilation.

We know that Naziism was actually quite boring sexually: women were regarded as aryan breeding machines whose place was in the kitchen, or at the sewing machine repairing their husbands’ Nazi armbands. They dressed like Ann Widdecombe and were slightly less alluring. But the idea of the cruel woman is a popular one, and you don’t get much crueller than a Nazi, do you? The computer game Return to Castle Wolfenstein has a bit where you have to fight your way through a dozen cat-suited, high-heeled, sten-gun toting Nazi girls. I’ve played that level of the game about 200 times because, quite frankly, I can’t think of a more enjoyable way to die.

There wasn’t much Nazi sex filth in Nazi Germany (yes, Goebbels organised sex parties, but the idea was that all the girls ended up preggers with little blonde spawn). But still we like to imagine that there was, in mucky “art” films like Salon Kitty, with its Nazi hookers,  and Salò, with its Fascist sexual degredation and poo-eating. 

According to prostitutes interviewed by Nancy Friday (she of the Secret Garden),  the men who turn up at brothels with holocaust-themed sex fantasies are usually Jewish. It’s a basic human response to defray fear and anxiety with sex. Converstaion I once had at camp: “I’m scared of ghosts” “Have a wank, then.” Sure enough, I soon forgot about the ghosts. And if I’d carried on like that, God knows what I’d be into today. I could probably only be aroused by a ghost story.

Mel Brookes said that the best way to remember Hitler is to laugh at him and his iconography. If we could also reduce Naziism to a freakish sexual fetish then that would be good too. We are all very accustomed to the double-pornography of News of the World and its ilk: saying that something is awful and depraved, then explaining and showing in great detail just how awful and depraved it is. But the only depravity here is that of cynicism, deceit and the invasion of privacy.

Paying five prostitutes to beat you, blow you and make you a cup of tea is a fairly straightforward, honest and understandable financial transaction, which should be supported by anyone happy to live under free-market capitalism. A crap newspaper paying bribes and being allowed to site spy cameras with impunity - let alone preach to us - is, on the other hand, revolting. 

I have been considering ending it all on Facebook. I’ve had enough. Social networking my arse. It does nothing but expose the fragility of our social networks. They’re spiders’ webs of lip service and sycophancy. I don’t doubt for a moment that I am as important to most of my acquaintances as the colour of their next fruit pastille. That’s fine. It’s the jibing and the cajoling I don’t like.

It told me several weeks ago that I should join the Flirt add-on because two people have a crush on me. Obviously, being both married and wary of Viagra and knob-extender salespersons I ignored it. But with each log-on the message came up again and the number grew: first three, then five, then seven crushes. This was just silly. And uninteresting. If it said: “Seven people really agree with you that Strawberries was the best album by The Damned”, or “Five people are convinced by your argument that Hazel Blears is really Dolores Umbridge”, then I would just HAVE to join up to see who these wonderful, life-affirming, my-kind-of-people are. But crush? Who the hell cares if someone, somewhere in the indifferent ether, is entertaining a juvenile reverie about them?

Well, I knew that nobody, anywhere, actually is. But then today it tried a more believable tack: “Two people have a crush on you, one person thinks you’re ugly. Click here to find out who!”. You fucking what? You’re telling me that someone has, shrouded by Facebook, impugned my appearance; shot a spud gun from a gloved hand and punctured  my brittle ego - and I have to jump through your purile cyberhoops to see who, oh who, would be so cruel? Fuck off! I know it’s a ruse. I know it’s not real. But still. The unreal detractor hurts a hundred times more than the seven equally unreal admirers cheered me up.

Which is something to bear in mind as the Summer of Reviews dawns again. It doesn’t matter what hacks may say in praise of what a comic does: hilarious, riotous, clever, sophisticated, devastating, witty, sharp… I mean, all these adjectives are nice, but one “failed to ignite the crowd” or “misjudged the mood of the room” or “needed more passion” blows all that out of the water for most comics I’ve ever spoken to.

Comedy is an obsession like gambling: if you lose you have to throw more time and emotion and money at it to win your credit back again; if you win you never quite win big enough. Because praise is Zimbabwean dollars; a currency with diminishing returns. The more you accumulate over the years the less it enriches you; you realise that the qualities ascribed to you are no more nor less than those required to do your job, while every new act with ten gigs can pull out the word Brilliant in quote marks and swear blind that somebody important said it about them. Criticism, meanwhile, is mercury: each drop of it accummulates in your system until it poisons you, and no amount of Mugabe Greenback will ever buy you a cure.   

That said, bring on the fookin Fringe!  

I have lately deleted all the posts on here that object to certain people, mainly in politics. Someone said I was getting “preachy”, and that would never do. Next stop after Preachy is Pious. So I’m going to reserve all my negative opinions, at least for now, to non-sentient household objects, about which it is easy to grumble but downright impossible to preach.

So: Mattresses. I hate ‘em. Collectively they are like a friend who let me down. Once a playmate, in those days when a bed was also a trampoline. The thicker the mattress, the boingier the springs in it, the better I liked it. But the day came when my spine was no longer made of rubber, and that’s the day when Ol’ Mattress turned against me. He said You’re no fun any more, and he tied my back in a knot for daring to hit puberty.

Since then I’ve flirted with Silentnight and Sleepeaze and Individually Pocketed Springs but they’re all the same; they treat me well for one or two nights then silently, slowly start to commit osteopathic murder. 

The typical modern double mattress is a disgusting thing anyway, as I was reminded today when we returned to Little George’s old house to pick up two beds with mattresses, as used by her tenants. LG says that nobody will buy our house unless we show it to people with ‘proper’ beds in it. Most people think that only hippies sleep on the floor, and nobody wants to buy a house from a hippie. This is true. I’ve seen a lot of hippie houses lately where the beds were just piles of sad rags, and all such homes stank of cats and compost. I got the impression that the children who lay under the rags were down in the cellar digging; keeping their tight-arsed parents self-sufficient in coal and iron ore.

But I don’t like getting mattresses down from upstairs. It’s the worst job ever. Mattresses are like Gilbert Grape’s mum. You install them up there and then, over the years, they become more knackered, ugly, shapeless, worn out and heavy with filth. Really, it’s better to leave them there and burn the house down around them than have to suffer the indignity of getting them out again. But no. I had to carry two of these things downstairs and across to the van, and then later I had to carry them across the street to our home.

Mattresses of one year old or more are already heavily daubed with the brown (why it all turns brown, I don’t know) residue of human sweat and excressence. Carrying  the first one through my front door, I was sure the neighbours were thinking: “So that’s what 18 months of Mr Mullone’s dried sweat and nocturnal emissions look like. How interesting.” “This isn’t my mattress,” I explained to a neighbour, who was loooking quizically at it. “Someone else has been using it.” His look seemed to ask why I was taking someone else’s stains, in mattress form, into the sanctuary of my home. The only possible answer was ”to lie naked on top of it and frolic”. I felt sick. My home looks normal now but I can’t sleep in it any more. Those stinking hippies had a good thing going.   

Today I was finally resolved to face my fears and went to the Dulwich Hospital to have my chest X-rayed. I asked reception which way I should go. The lady told me. And a hospital porter said: “Don’t tell ‘em any lies, they’ll see right through you!” I said: “I’m sure that’s very funny, but let’s wait and see if I’ve got lung cancer first, shall we?”

Well of course I didn’t actually say that at the time. But I thought it, halfway down the long corridor. But I’m sure someone will say it, or something funnier, to him soon. I mean, this particular porter was still standing there when I left, making the same joke to another person who needed to be X-rayed. so it seems likely that, sooner or later, someone will put him in his place with a witty retort. I’m just sorry it won’t be me. Unless I have to go back there. But if I do have to go back to that place it’ll mean bad news, and I’m sure I won’t be in the mood for putting comedic porters in their place.

The reading matter in the waiting room was thus: A copy of Golfer. A copy of Golfing World. A copy of The People’s Friend (November 2007), Queen’s Diamond Wedding edition. Two pamphlets, one called “Find Comfort in the Bible”, another ”Dealing with the Death of a Loved One”. It seems that, in their darkest hour, people turn to either God or golf. Or perhaps it’s more sensitive than that. Some things must be banned from such waiting rooms, because there were some pretty poorly people in there. Tabloid travel supplements, for instance, are the mainstay of most medical facilities. But here they would just have tantalised the patients with apartment block-encrusted costas they will never see, rip-off paraglides they will never take, inflatable bananas they will never ride, disappointing cable cars they will never sit in; screaming gorillaesque kids of a family from Romford whom they will never try to avoid sitting next to on the cut-price dolphinarium tour. 

Because the most crass, gaudy, Torremolinos-like destination must seem like paradise from inside a hospital waiting room when a radiologist is cranking up the machine that can read the time on the death clock within your ribs.

Far better to find yourself thinking: “You know, I never did play golf,” and naturally concluding “Thank fuck for that”. Everyone should be told, obliquely, that they spent their time on this earth as well as they possibly could.

Today was rather depressing as I was set upon by bills for the Fringe. There were many of them, they were all very big, and so I was pummelled almost to the point of emotional breakdown. Every year comedians invite this big mugger, The Fringe, into their lives, and make him a cup of tea. And then feel mildly surprised when he makes off with the family silver and every last scrap of their self-belief and self-sufficiency.

I know Gordon Brown hasn’t had much luck with his tax policies of late, and I’d hate to give him more bad ideas. But really, if he wanted to get a better tax return from about 500 people in the country, he could just ban the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s the Fringe that means I won’t turn a profit til the Olympics. It’s the Fringe that means my taxable income is minus £5,000 this year. It’s the Fringe that means my “outgoings” column is full of “exceptionals”. Like experimental haircuts and rhinestone shirts and new Converse trainers.

Ah yes: I have just realised something about Converse trainers which must be recorded as the Converse Law. They hurt like fuckery for ages. Then, suddenly, when you least expect it, they start to feel comfortable. Relieved, you console yourself that you have not spent £35 at Schuh just to have bunions. But the point at which Converse trainers feel comfortable is the exact same point they start to look absolutely shagged. You might get a two-week window when they’re fashionably scuffed and still just about bearable, but that’s pretty much it. Converse trainers are kind of like avocadoes; they’re either rock-hard or mush. I bought a hard avocado yesterday morning. It became ripe during the second commercial break of Eastenders, but by the opening hymn of Songs of Praise it was snot with a stone in.

The Converse Law applies to comedy: the point most of us work out what we’re doing, what we’re about and what we have to say that’s so important - that’s the exact same point we realise we can’t afford to do it any more. The Converse Law is a general rule of life: Youth means passion and good looks and pain. If you’re not feeling negative emotions - angst, shame, terror, hatred, fear, rage, jealousy - then you’re probably past it. And should give up wearing Connies, ‘cos they certainly don’t suit Keith Richards any more. Maybe just wear slippers. Or flip flops. Comfy and Cool do not exist together in any sphere of the human experience.

The hot comedy topic of the moment is Johnny Vegas and whether he committed sexual assault when he groped a woman onstage. A lot of people are commenting; some were even there at the time. I wasn’t. But, to quote the Observer’s Jackie Clune, “that needn’t preclude me from being fascinated by what the reportage has thrown up”. Eh? Yes, she really said that.

More intelligent people are saying that it all depends on whether the woman in question believes that she was assaulted, and whether she decides to press charges.
Well clearly THAT won’t happen: the ramifications for her in doing so - tabloids, courtroom inquisition, paps and counter-suits - make that an even less attractive proposition than Mr Vegas’s “reviving kiss”. But here’s an interesting thought:

If she DID take Vegas to court and win, then the audience must be implicated. As I understand it, the law in both the US and the UK (and most of the Commonwealth) states that people watching an incidence of sexual assault take place can be charged as accomplices if their presence helped create an “environment” in which the assault could happen. It’s difficult to see how a comedy audience - by laughing, goading, or even just sitting there feeling uncomfortable but sitting through it nonetheless - could do anything but help create such an environment.

In a perverse way, I’d like to see the whole audience go to prison. I don’t mean that in a judgmental way, because I pass no judgment. I don’t mean to be mean-spirited, either, against this particular audience. I mean, God knows what I would have done and spectulation is pointless. I would just like to see, for the long-term good health of standup comedy and the British performing arts in general, AN ENTIRE AUDIENCE go to prison.

Those who thought it was funny because it upset the “middle class”, sure, they should be jailed for thinking there’s still a miner’s strike. But more so those who thought it was “hideous” and just sat there anyway. Are not the inner circles of Hades reserved for those who knew the Truth, but spurned it?

Believe me, jailing a whole audience would revive comedy. It would be a watershed that might wash away the fourth wall and reconcile the performer with the people. Comedy-goers would realise several important things that they have forgotten for too fucking long:

1. Yes, what you’re seeing up there is REAL, and you are required to empathise on some basic level.

2. You are just as responsible as the comedian for whether the night is good, bad, funny, shambolic or sexually criminal.

3. Comedy is a test to see whether you can maintain your individual dignity in a mob situation. Most of us cannot, but we ought to try.

4. You cannot, Mary O’Hara of the Guardian, be Sir Galahad after the event. By stating, loud and clear, that you saw the woman on that stage being absolutely and definitively molested, you damn nobody but yourself.

Popular opinion holds that true freedom is having the government you want. It isn’t. A government that thinks it is loved will do horrible things to your civil rights. Freedom is having the government you don’t want; a government which, thanks to democracy, desperately needs you to forgive it. Such as this one. This is a good government. I like this government. This sinking ship of penitents is the most agreeable government we’ve had for a long time.

Small government is best. As P.J. O’Rourke said: “A little government and a little luck are both essential in life, but only a fool trusts either one”. This one, now, has abandoned its excess-rubbish tax and is looking at its detention-without-trial errors. Soon we may hear the glorious chime of the ID Card bill hitting the bottom of the dustbin. The government is formulating no more Big Ideas based on dubious dogma. It is not proposing to draft any more laws, and the viciously cynical gerimandering that Hazel Blears did in Chester can no longer be afforded. The MPs ‘pay rise’ will die like a dog in the sun of public contempt. The administration has no more credit with the people. It is morally bankrupt. It is perfectly, gloriously paralysed. It will, comparitively speaking, do almost nothing for two wonderful years.

There is no road back for Brown. If Brown reverses unpopular decisions, he will be called a u-turner. If he continues with them, he will be called arrogant. If he does anything too brave they’ll say he hasn’t learnt the lessons of political adventurism. If he listens to what people want now it will be too little, too late. He’ll do nothing, for fear of doing something wrong.

The Brown presidency will be like that of Calvin Coolidge in Jazz Age America. The “least president America ever had” did so little that, when it was announced that he had died, Dorothy Parker asked: “How can they tell?” Now - hooray! - Brown is our Coolidge. The business of the UK will be its own business. We will be left alone for a bit; unmolested, unbothered, unthreatened by further cuts into our liberty, privacy and dignity. Until the Conservatives arrive at No 10, of course, with their own brand of pomposity, warped idealism, canned carrots and shitty sticks. At that point the whole moribund process will begin again, and we will lose yet more things we hardly credited we had.

But for now, the disgusting duck of governance is lame. It’s going to be a brilliant summer.