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It’s taken me a little while to recuperate from my fall, which although largely comic, did shake me up a bit and the carpet burns have turned out to be quite deep and painful. But I am back on the exercise trail again now, completing a leisurely 6.75mile run yesterday (I ran as myself, but it took 64.5 minutes, giving me a new-found respect for the competitiveness and drive of the Mes who can do it much faster). Today we went for a swim and I had lots of energy, completing 41 (shortish) lengths in 31 minutes.
The bags that Ian Virgin supplies to put your damp sports kit serve as very good cat litter bags. They are strong enough to hold half a day’s worth of cat excrement and don’t have any holes in them (like most supermarket carrier bags) and so after a swim I usually take two of three extra bags to use for catwee and feline faeces. Technically this is light theft - maybe not on a scale with my actual felony of stealing single pick and mix sweets, but still in a moral grey area. It’s unlikely that any of Ian Virgin’s hired goons would arrest me for taking three or four bags instead of one. And I pay handsomely for the honour of using this gym and once had a horrible experience where the shampoo smelled like human excrement (as I only discovered once it was in my hair). It’s the kind of stealing that is socially acceptable and I doubt anyone would have much of a problem with it. But if taking a couple of extra bags is OK, when does it tip over into being morally and criminally wrong. Is taking ten bags OK? And if not, at what point did we cross the line? What if you help yourself to the whole roll? That’s more of a misdemeanour, right? Suddenly you are no longer stealing from “the manâ€, but inconveniencing other gym users. I mean, another roll of bags will be added within the hour, but now you’ve gone from “personal use†that really hardly effects anyone to stealing something with a value of maybe £1 or more. But is it really any different to steal a hundred bags in one go than it is to take the same number of bags over a couple of months? That’s an interesting moral conundrum about what is acceptable and what is not. Similarly if I steal one pick and mix at every service station then only an idiot would call for my arrest for a single incident, but at the end of a year I might have taken tens of pounds worth of sweets (if I really dedicated my life to this - in reality I think I probably get away with about 10 sweets a year). What if the gym store room was left open and you saw a big box containing thousands of plastic bags? That could keep you in cat litter bags for the lifetime of your cats, would it be acceptable to do all your stealing in one go and take as many as you could? It wouldn’t (though it would be an audacious theft and I would make an Ocean’s 11 (Pool’s 11) film about it), but where is the moral distinction? Yet a zero tolerance attitude towards stealing leads to paupers being deported for stealing a loaf of bread, or 47 year old men losing their career and social standing for taking a horrible blue and pink bottle-shaped candy.
It’s a moral maze.
And the reason it’s on my mind is because the other day, in a fit of selfish madness. I did take the whole roll of bags away with me (to be fair it was well over half-gone already). It has proven to be incredibly useful to me in keeping my cat litter trays tidy, but when I think of the two or three men who might have arrived at the dispenser in the next 30 minutes and not been able to put their slightly damp swimming trunks in a bag and thus got their bags and possessions slightly damp…. well I feel guilty about what I’ve done. But there is no way for me to repay those men. And I’d ask you this question, who is the real criminal in this society, is it the normal 47 year-old man who steals a roll of bags from a gym changing room, even though he is relatively wealthy and could afford to buy his own roll of plastic bags or is it the businessman in his suit and tie, charging people £70 a month to use his gym, even though he is a billionaire and owns his own island? It’s the first one in this case, but that wasn’t a very good example.
Still, it’s another crime to add to my spree and one that again I haven’t been caught for (though I was nervous that a gym staff member might see me put the roll in my bag and then have to work out how to react).
It’s interesting though how some thefts are definitely crimes and others have this moral ambiguity about them. I have probably taken a roll’s worth of bags from Ian Virgin’s gyms before, just very slowly, three at a time, so why is that OK, but taking the whole roll wrong? I mean I agree with you, it was wrong. But I got away with it and I am delighted to have a ready supply of cat litter bags. It’s just interesting. Like some professions get to get tips for no real discernible reason, it’s OK to steal pens from work or take shampoo from hotels or a few extra plastic bags from a gym.
Have I been moral, immoral or amoral? When will the police catch up with me for my crimes? And if they don’t, will things escalate? I mean Ian Virgin has loads of planes, would it really be a crime for me to steal just one of them?
Still it was nice for me not to sue him over the human excrement smelling shampoo incident, so if I was him I’d keep my mouth shut. About the bags. If I fly off in one of his planes I have probably overstepped the line.
This afternoon I carried on with my quest to become a slightly less half-arsed podcaster, by putting together a brand new “Lord of the Dance Settee†podcast. Obviously in part this is to promote the tour, which kicks off again on the 20th February in Colchester, but will also hopefully become a weekly thing that follows my progress on the road, sharing funny/boring stories of the funny/boring things that happen to me, plus include some additional routines that didn’t make it into the show. Plus it’s a chance to do a bit more in-depth analysis of what the show is about and my motivations for doing it, as well as uncovering some of the secret themes which have largely been missed by reviewers. It’s not going to contain more than minimal bits of material from the show, though if I can remember to record each performance I might add in some bloopers or anything unusual that happens. Hopefully it will serve as a nice bonus extra about life as a comedian and give me a chance to explore some ideas that might appear in future shows. It took me longer to put together than most podcasts I do, as I badly edited in some music and tried (and I think failed) to sort out the slight echo effect on garageband. I also couldn’t work out how to get the playhead to move around to where I wanted it. I pressed the wrong button at some point which meant the arrow kept jumping back to the beginning and the only way to get it to where I needed to go was to drag it manually. I am sure I will sort these issues out (either on my own or by going to a training session at the Apple store). I managed to master fading in and out after a few false starts.
It takes a little while for new podcasts to show up on iTunes, but I will let you know when this available. It contains some bonus stories about how I had my heart broken after my first school disco (not in the way you might expect) and how I broke a caravan window by masturbating when I was 17 (which I think I tried to do as material a few years back - and maybe a blog- but don’t think has been widely heard before). If you can put up with the weird echo I think you will enjoy it. If you know how I can turn off the weird echo then let me know. It might be the mic I suppose.
