I recently asked a friend if they wanted to go and see the Rose Wylie exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. “With you, on a Saturday afternoon?”, they replied. “Of course not. It would be awful.” And they were right. It would be.
Inevitably, half a dozen or so times a day at least, whenever I am on the verge of entering a profound reverie of impossible meaning, either while watching music at a festival or in a pub back room, or while staring at some transformative canvas in a gallery, or while gazing across the Welsh hills from the top of a mountain I have just climbed alone, or while meeting my half-sister for the first time ever in my life in an otherwise empty Norwich pub, I am interrupted by an impeccably polite member of the public kindly telling me how much they like my work. It is an ongoing inconvenience that is simultaneously both deeply gratifying and deeply distressing, like drinking a delicious real ale that you know has been brewed from the urine of a horse.
I’m grateful for, and often moved by, the public’s support and encouragement, and their stories of what the work has meant to them, and accept that these jarring moment-mangling incidents are a small price to pay for the security and satisfaction of being the world’s most consistently critically acclaimed standup comedian, despite also being someone who’d rather be buried in sand and forced to stare directly into the sun than have to make eye contact with a stranger.
But I spent the last two weeks touring theatres in Ireland, where people either don’t know me, despite the healthy ticket sales, or are at least better at choosing their moments, understanding the intimate relationship that can exist between a solitary man, a pint of Guinness, a book and some Tayto crisps, and I luxuriated in my anonymity. I expect I will ruin it by becoming popular here as well. Such is the curse of genius.
What a 10 days it has been! In Clonakilty, I saw Noel Redding’s displaced Jimi Hendrix Experience bass on the wall of De Barras’s bar, and later ate the legendary local black pudding ceremonially alone at the centre of the Templebryan stone circle, in memory of my famine-fleeing Clonakilty ancestors; at Coughlan’s bar in Cork I watched a sublime Monday night traditional music session, gloriously without company, and read a biography of the Pink Fairies from cover to cover; in Dublin I unexpectedly saw an etching by William Blake’s disciple Edward Calvert, whose grave I genuflect towards alone once a week or so in the cemetery near my Hackney home. It was all too much! Or not enough!
In Derry, I drank too much in the company of jazz writers and ate, rudely and without asking permission, too many peanuts from a nut bag belonging to a biographer of John McLaughlin; in Dundalk, in contrast, I didn’t drink enough, and lay awake haunted by the horrifying severed head of Saint Oliver Plunkett, which I had seen by mistake earlier that day in Drogheda, where it appears to be displayed inside a massive food mixer; in Cork, in the cellar of Bunker Vinyl, I saw a scrap of wallpaper salvaged from the home of the Fall’s Mark E Smith, a sacred relic of equal significance.
And on Tuesday night, in Phil Grimes’s pub in Waterford, occasionally conversing with a barman who made an absolute artform of perfectly judged small talk, I made one pint of Guinness last for four hours as I read the whole of Rosemary Tonks’s waspish 1970 novel The Way Out of Berkeley Square, an intimate and extended communion with a writer the like of which I have not had time to achieve for years and one appropriate, at the risk of sounding patronising and sentimental, to the island of storytellers. And black pudding. And Tayto crisps.
Tommy Robinson is Putin’s guest in Moscow. He is fraternising with Elon Musk’s father, Errol, who accidentally got his own stepdaughter pregnant twice
But, while doing this, I am afraid I was morbidly drawn to check my phone intermittently, to follow the pogrom – let’s call it what it is – unfolding in the North, a few hours, and yet a whole world, away. Because when innocent children are burned out of their beds – as the Reform conference star and my ex-fiancee’s cousin Lucy Connolly called for them to be in 2024 – it is not a protest, it is a pogrom. Just like the Nazi pogroms of the 1930s. Nigel Farage’s cut-price Kristallnacht. And its perpetrators should be dealt with at least as harshly as a pensioner holding up a humorous sign saying “Plasticine Action”. If not even more harshly.
I won’t lie. It has been a relief to have a week off religiously following the enormity of world’s endless bad news for my Nerve column, a process which sometimes leaves me feeling utterly dispirited, and long days of travelling between shows midweek meant I filed last week’s missive three days late anyway. But from a distance it seems utterly clear what is happening.
Tommy Robinson is Putin’s guest in Moscow. He is fraternising with his fellow Putin-admirer, Elon Musk’s father Errol Musk, who accidentally got his own stepdaughter pregnant twice, which seems careless. From there, Robinson directs his UK followers to fight, destabilising the UK to the delight of his Russian friends. But I hope he is taking the work seriously.
When Robinson went to a white supremacist meetup in Montreal in 2024, his Canadian facilitator, the Holocaust denier Beth Nodwell, was disappointed that his first-night frolics descended into an alleged cocaine bender that ended up in a massage parlour. Disillusioned Nodwell had wanted to believe in the sunbed fraudster’s message but concluded: “If you are doing drugs with prostitutes, you aren’t defending women.” Without a conscientious white supremacist like Nodwell around, God only knows what Robinson and Musk senior are getting up to in the land of kompromat.
Domestically, Reform’s Nigel Farage and Restore’s Rupert Lowe covertly and explicitly, respectively, call for violence, no longer just against immigrants, but against anyone they consider culturally different. Putin is of course delighted about this, as he was about Brexit, and so are JD Vance and Pete Hegseth. Competing for the approval of these figures, and for the funds they may bestow, and for a significant share of the homegrown evil-slash-moron vote, is forcing Farage and Lowe to try to out-racist each other, a battle which can’t end well but may be morbidly fascinating to watch, like when the zombie fights the shark underwater in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979).
Elon Musk’s Twitter (currently X) amplifies and monetises these calls to arms without context or balance, alongside its side menu of AI-generated child porn and images of sexually assaulted feminists, with an impact no legitimate news service or politician can match. And Starmer’s response? To post a condemnation of the Belfast pogrom on the very same platform. It’s as if Churchill had done a deal with the German bombers dropping propaganda leaflets over wartime Britain to chuck a small percentage of anti-Nazi ones into the mix as well. Idiot.
This week, Starmer said he would make Apple and Google modify their phones to prevent under-18s sharing explicit images … in three months’ time, if that’s all right with everyone. Does he really think that a tech community whose most powerful figure is happy to initiate a pogrom will care about his impotent demands for content regulation?
The one good thing about all this? Any kids studying the 1930s and the rise of fascism for GCSE have no excuse for not getting a high score. All they need to do to understand it is to look around them. Reform is already improving educational standards and Farage isn’t even in power yet.
Tomorrow I am on a plane home to the UK. At the moment, the Republic of Ireland’s trajectory towards fascism seems at least a decade behind ours, but the first stirrings of populism are visible. Though a heroic bystander did intervene, with a hurling stick, in the Belfast attack in the North, no one intervened when a black shoplifter was killed by security guards in the street in Dublin last week, perhaps because he was one of those Africans the former taoiseach Bertie Ahern was filmed saying he didn’t like. Irish friends say what might stop the rise of racism in the Republic is that if white supremacism is seen as a British thing, Irish people won’t want to be racist on principle. God bless them!
Maybe the Irish will let me emigrate. I’m 60 soon. All I wanted was to die in a land I still recognise as a western liberal democracy. With nice pubs. Was that too much to ask? But it could be worse. I could be British and brown. Then maybe I’d be thinking about packing my bags right now.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run just announced.
Stewart has programmed, and will be appearing in, Up The Anti, a benefit for North London Hunt Saboteurs, at London’s Leicester Square theatre on 6 July, alongside Daniel Fox, Harry Badger, James Gill, Horn Walsh, Sue Jerkins, Shappi Coarse-Angling, Alasdair Bear-Baiting and Stewart Eel.