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Within two minutes of disembarking the plane, it was patently clear that we were in London. In the customs queue, waiting to get our passports checked to allow us back into the country, I heard the following sentence from a very posh upper-class sounding man: “yo Charles, would you pop into Waitrose and pick up a Quinoa salad for Victoria? Yeah, great, chau.”
There were written notices and audio announcements instructing us not to use our phones until we were out of the customs area. However, I’ve just done some Googling, and it appears that there is a caveat in the rules that states that it’s OK to use your phone if you’re a posh upper-class hipster who’s simply trying to procure some South American food from an upmarket outlet. So that’s fine then.
So I’m back in England after a really successful Australian tour, where we only managed to anger one person; or at least that’s all we know about. Last week I mentioned the woman who had a go at us for being sexist. This was because when the sound technician bounded onto the stage in order to change a cable mid-gig, I joked that she could have waited until I’d got off stage after the gig if she wanted to ask me on a date. A lady then approached us after the gig and accused us of being sexist and making chauvinistic comments towards the sound technician, as well as telling us that we wouldn’t have said that if it was a male sound technician. We tried to point out to her that we may well have said the same thing if it was a man, which is true, but this line of defence seemed to anger her more. Apologising for any offence caused ddidn’t really placate her either.
The complaining woman was obviously so incensed by this comment towards the sound technician that she’s made a complaint to the festival, meaning that we received an email from the festival organiser informing us that a complaint has been made against us on the grounds of us being sexist. I’m not sure how seriously the complaint will be taken, and hopefully it will be dismissed pretty swiftly, baring in mind that the rest of the audience were laughing and were very effusive in their applause at the end of the gig, as well as being very complimentary to us when we met many of them afterwards.
Surely one woman’s complaint can’t jeopardise our future festival attendance, baring in mind the tremendously positive reaction we received across the board? It’s one woman for goodness sake. I’m assuming that the festival adopts a points system for feedback, whereby men’s comments are worth double points to that of women’s, which is clearly just basic common sense. I am not being sexist here, for I am in no way sexist; I am just being logical, and there is a fundamental difference. If the festival is using this logical points system, then one woman’s voice is worth practically nothing.
If the festival does decide to ban us from appearing in subsequent years on the grounds that we are sexist, then they should also ban their audience, given that they all seemed to laugh loudly after I made the sexist comment. In fact, they should also fire the stage manager, and all the staff who were working during our gig, because they all said how much they’d enjoyed the show, the bunch of sexists. If you’re one of the festival organisers reading this, you might be thinking, “ah, but David, the stage manager is a woman, so we can’t fire her on the grounds that she was complicit in supporting your sexism, when she’s a woman.” But you have clearly fallen into the trap of being sexist yourselves. If you only fire men on the grounds of sexism towards women, whilst refusing to fire ladies who support sexism against their own gender, then you yourselves are being sexist. In fact, why don’t you fire yourselves while you’re at it? You sexist pigs!
I feel as if I have so much more I could write about. I was running through today’s Dollop in my head on the plane and I had some really good ideas, but that was before the deep-brain thrombosis set in and addled my mind. I’m writing this in the car on the very last leg of what’s going to amount to a 30 hour journey. Now let’s just hope I don’t get back home and discover that the WIFI is down. It would be ridiculous if I’ve managed to keep this challenge going in spite of the fact that I’ve been in Australia for three weeks, only to then discover that I can’t get on the Internet in my own house to release the 90th Dollop.
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