I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, and also I'm Chinese

October gigs and opportunities for free stuff

Good afternoon, and thank you for reading this at such short notice.

There’s no easy way to say this, but I have some bad news. I have booked a load of gigs in October and I want you to come to some or all of them.

After that I will tell you about a dream I had.

• Instant Laughs Bring Your Own Booze Comedy - 8pm (doors 7pm) TOMORROW Weds 2 October at Arthur’s Café, 170 Arthur Rd, London SW19 8AQ

  A fun format where the acts get interrupted and forced to do improv based on audience suggestions in the middle of their set; MC Dave Wilder, Josh Faulkner is also on and he’s funny, I’ll probably be a dog - tickets here, BYOB [corkage £5].

  

• Compulsive Comedy - 7:30pm Mon 7 October at The Carlton Tavern, 33 Carlton Vale, London NW6 5EU

  BRINGER gig so I need someone to come with me or I can’t perform - drinks are on me if you’re up for it, let me know.

• LOLipops late show - 8pm Tue 8 October at the White Hart, 22 Suffolk Street, London SE1 0UG

  There are two White Harts in Southwark so don’t fuck it up and go to the wrong one.

• Shtick Comedy Club - 7:30pm Weds 9 October at The Rose & Crown, 71-73 Torriano Ave, London, NW5 2SG
  Another fucking BRINGER so please come. You don’t need a ticket if you’re my bringer but if you want to bring a friend you can buy a £5 ticket with a free drink worth more than £5 here.

• Full Frontal Comedy - 7:45 Mon 21 October at The Watermans Arms, Brocas St, ETON, SL4 6BW

  See, it’s not all London gigs, sometimes I travel around to entertain and delight people living in poorer areas that have been left behind by Rishi Sunak’s economic revolution.

Please let me know if you want to come to one of the bringer gigs. I’ll be doing them as a dog character so it will be all new material to you, unless you’ve seen me as a dog before in which case I will try to add some new stuff just for you, or I can be human if you prefer. People tend to prefer the dog.

Bonus opportunities

I have a spare ticket to see a promising young queer neurodiverse Indigenous act called Rob Moriarty this Thursday 3 October at 9:45pm at the Bill Murray. Let me know if you want to come and see him with me; he’s very funny and I strongly recommend his podcast.

Also don’t forget I can get you into a book launch on Friday night with an open bar, as long as I can trust you not to do anything mental.

Before we get into the dream, please subscribe to get this newsletter by email for free, as I’m sick of having to share it to Facebook and Instagram:

My dream

I was in Edinburgh, just walking around killing time. But then I realised that I had returned to London days ago. Why was I back in Edinburgh? Had I forgotten something important that had happened?

I reached for my phone to look at my calendar and figure out what was going on. But my phone wasn’t in my pocket! Instead there was a tiny kind of a flip phone, with an amber screen. I had a bunch of incoming messages from usernames I didn’t know like jeremiah4974, messages that made no sense to me.

My wallet was different too. Who was I?

I went to a shop window that had a display of mirrors. My reflection showed I was a middle aged Chinese man who looked a bit like me. Perhaps Eurasian, but with the Chinese style beard - I don’t think it’s OK to say “Fu Manchu” nowadays, but you know the kind I mean.

Except that some of the mirrors were angled so that I could see the reflection of my reflection, and in those I was still regular octoroon me. On a monitor in the corner, I could see the output of a security camera, in which I looked like me too.

I considered my situation. Obviously (to my dreaming mind) I was either trapped in a virtual reality simulation or having some kind of stroke. For some reason, the true explanation that this was all a dream was not available to me at this point.

I found a bunch of comedians in a café and asked them if they knew what was going on. One of them (reminiscent of, but distinct from, a comedian I know) started giving me a long rambling explanation of how difficult it is to know if you’re in a time pool(?).

I couldn’t really follow what he was saying. Soon I realised that he and his explanation were also just a part of this nonsense reality. I started to become alarmed that maybe I was in a coma, or having a schizophrenic episode. I had to get out! How could I pull myself out?

Then I woke myself up by literally lifting my head off the pillow.

That is a real dream I had. I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to read too much into these things.