ONE FLU OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST Just another Corona jab.

    A whole week without booze! “I’m cleverer than Einstein and cleaner than Jesus!” I tell myself in a spasm of sincere self-congratulation. As our train slides into wonderful wonderful Copenhagen at 1.23pm, I’m determined to repeat this health-ridden exercise. At 0:09am I’m in a gay bar called Jailhouse pissed on gin and tequila and, according to the majority of medical text books, stoned. The exercise has been compromised. As when a certain meteor smacked into the earth, the dinosaurs were compromised.
    We have arrived from lovely, strange Aalborg, another town somewhere in Denmark. I say ‘somewhere’ as maps have lost some of their cachet. Finding where you are on a map isn’t going to reduce the number of shows you have to do or make the walk to the laundrette any shorter or persuade that cracking stage-hand to go from burly to burlesque. We’re somewhere with our set and our costumes and our mates and, strangely, that’s enough to go on. It’s nice to know I’m in Denmark, but not essential.
    There is a festival on our last day in Aalborg. An annual event. None of the local crew seem to know why there’s a festival, just that there is one and that everyone gets rather excited about it. There are little hints about how early some people start celebrating, how enthusiastically people will be celebrating, and how thoroughly Aalborg will have celebrated come the next day. These hints are dropped with a sheen of pride attached. They all but wink, their heads tilted to that special angle, the one full to the brim with insinuation.
    It goes by our hotel. Right out the front. I wake up to music and the unmistakable noise of a crowd. Wander onto my balcony. Look down. There are high, wired barricades all along the road and security men with Alsatians and it feels like this year’s theme might be Occupied France. Should I phone my mother and say goodbye after giving her my love and PIN numbers? The parade is underway and the first hour is rather impressive. Dancing teacups and life-size silk elephants and yellow men on ludicrously high stilts and a team of trumpets and lots of colour and movement and now we have moved down to street level with our cameras and smiles and I’m still thinking those fences look like over-compensation when the first beer can smacks into said fence and sticky beer flies beyond the wire and onto an Alsatian. The Alsatian barely flinches and has clearly been to one of these festivals before. Marvellous and expensive costumes that have taken days to construct quickly descend to the sheet and/or garbage bag category, and choreography and formation bleed away until there is nothing but lurching and running and synchronised disintegration. The fences are the banks to this fast-moving river of togas and face-paint, and forces it to flow within the definition of the word ‘parade’. Just.
    A lot Aalborgians were painted blue for a reason known only to them and the local make-up shop. And if you didn’t feel like going blue, it was perfectly alright to black up and wear an afro wig. No shortage of Martin Lutherisms in these parts but clearly a tad behind on the Luther Kingisms. They probably think ‘I have a dream…’ is from some Abba musical. Some of these people were with their (DNA-authentic) black mates, who obviously weren’t in the least offended, so we could only shrug and smile and concentrate on the not-Smurfs. The beer cans flew, the coloured whities ran and yelled, and our musical director made a pertinent social observation: “There’s going to be a lot of fucking against trees in Aalborg today.”
    We bussed off to our venue, The Gigantium (in which I would not have been surprised to overhear the question “Did you see where I left my aircraft? I’m sure I put it just over there but someone must have moved it…”), and did two shows. When we came back, most of the centurions and cavewomen (very popular) were gone and in the surrounding parks you could see the wood for the trees but not the grass for the rubbish. We walked to the train station the next day. It felt like we were sneaking between two strongholds in Dawn of the Dead.
    No wonder I resolved to have a week off the piss as we slid into Copenhagen. But we all know how that went…