25/06/05 Peebles

It's the Peebles Beltane Festival and I joined the Samba Band in the parade in the sunshine. As Gala Days go, it's a good one as the locals all seem to get genuinely enthusiastic and assume a healthy party mood for the occasion.
They are a simple, but happy folk.
There's a very developed love of transvestism present down Peebles way. I don't think I've ever seen so many men masquerading as ladies in a parade, outside of Brazil.
I've got this vision of them all getting drunk during the day, then smooching around at some late night "disco" in Peebles High Street, with the local blacksmith carelessly letting slip to the newsagent that he "actually quite enjoys the feel of exotic lingerie on his skin".
At this point the music would suddenly stop, and the DJ would hurriedly announce that everybody had to go home, as someone took things a "little too far". All the men dressed as ladies would trudge home talking in gruff voices about Rangers' prospects in the Champions League.
I was talking to Kim from Spain, a member of the Samba band about my stand-up routine. He said he understood everything perfectly except he couldn't work out why the punchlines were funny. I thought it best not to go into any further analysis on this topic, as the reason could be that in fact the punchlines were not funny, so he wasn't really missing anything. Of course, this is misplaced self-deprecatory humour going on here.
As Arnold Brown once said, I used to do self-deprecating humour, but I wasn't very good at it.
Kim is doing research at Edinburgh University into Parkinson's Disease. Interestingly, he plays shaker in the Samba Band.
We retired to Dot's for a tip top relaxed boozy barbecue. I think we now owe Dot 7 cows, 72 chickens and 570 gallons of beer, (it's hungry/thirsty work doing these marathon parades you know...)