John Tothill (10:58)
Hello, how are you all Doing you all right? It's so good to be here. And of course we've got to talk about Edward Dando, haven't we? Do we know about Edward Dando? Edward dando, the celebrated 19th century oyster glutton, Edward Dano. How do I tell you about. Okay, right, you know how on Wikipedia if you look something up on Wikipedia, Wikipedia has to purport to be objective, but like to a fault, you know, Wikipedia will be like, Adolf Hitler was an Austrian born German politician and you think, yeah, get on with it, come on, do you know what I mean? But if you look up Edward Dando on Wikipedia, Wikipedia says Edward Dando was a British thief. And it's like, okay, cancel my appointments for the afternoon. So, Ibut Dander was a kind of minor celebrity in about the 1800s, completely forgotten about now, but he was famous in his day for frequenting oyster restaurants, right? This was like at the height of Victorian London's obsession with oysters. Oysters just came out of the, came out of the Thames. Londoners couldn't get enough oysters. Edward Dander would go to these oyster restaurants and he would order dozens of oysters at a time. I mean like 200, 300 oysters at a time. And then he would draw a crowd and he would performatively eat all of them along with loaves of bread and kegs of ale. And then when the bill arrived, Edward Dando would swear to God he thought it was free. He claimed in court not to know how restaurants worked. And in these magistrates court he would always insist on representing himself. And in his testimonies he would always begin by saying, your worship, I was peckish and I refused to go hungry. In a land of plenty, of course, harsh 19th century justice. He'd be thrown into jail often for like months on end. With when he was in jail, he was thrown into solitary confinement because he kept eating the rations of the other prisoners. And then, and this is the clincher, Edward Dando, every single time on the day of his release, not the day after his release, on the day of his release, Edward Dando would walk from the prison gates to the nearest oyster restaurant and he would do it again. That is a man who is free. That is a man who knows himself. And I love the story of Edward Dando because for me, the story of Edward Dando reminds us of how much there is to be gluttonous for in the world. You know, I love living in the modern world. I adore it. I like the kind of modern food that other people pretend to Hate. I eat things like Rustler's burgers. Do you know why? Because I love it. Like, I really love it. People go, what are you talking about? What do you love? All of it. But you know what I mean. Like drinking, I love it. But even like sitting. Oh, I love it. I really love it. You know the irony that I am a stand up comedian, just the one hour of the day I'm not sat on my ass. I love it. I really, really love it. I feel that very strongly. Like it's interesting to me that greed and gluttony are separated in religious teaching. I don't think that gluttony belongs on that list of seven deadly sins. I don't think so. I think greed does, but I think gluttony is different. I think that gluttony is something of a virtue and I think it should be celebrated. But they are different, aren't they? Like we don't live in an age of gluttony. Not really. Gone are the days of Edward Dando, you know, gone are the days of the medieval feudal lord who kind of throws feasts and you know, bakes pies that are birds within birds within birds and that kind of thing. It's over. Nowadays the modern day equivalent of a feudal lord is just anyone in a friendship group who owns a printer. You know, Tragic. I mean, the stranglehold they have over the rest of us, it's unbelievable. But we don't live in an age of gluttony. We live in an age of appalling greed. We live in an age of the kind of cruel, scheming, evil greed. But it's the kind of greed which up close looks very moderate. Like it's no surprise to me, our modern day Silicon Valley overlords, they're not gangrenous Henry VIII, are they all. Like, they're gym bros, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is a gym bro. That guy Brian Johnson or whatever, he's a gym bro. Jeff Bezos is a bit of a gym bro. You know, they take their vitamins, they take their supplements, they optimize their daily routine, they go to the gym, they cut the small talk. You know, they want to, they want to expand their territories, they want to live forever. It's terribly easy. Egotistical, greedy behavior. Whereas at least gluttony in its kind of, it's not selfless but it's humble, isn't it? You know, like, do you think Edward Dando liked going to prison? Of course not, you know, but Edward Dando had The humility to say I don't matter, my life doesn't matter as much as the celebration of these oysters, you know, the celebration of life. In a similar way, I promise you, my bank balance does not matter as much as the celebration of a Domino's pizza. Do you know what I mean, though? I'm trying to make the point that gluttony is. It's over, you know, the greedy men have won. It drives me mad because also because I'm flying the gluttony flag out here, you know, I believe in gluttony and I took gluttony to a whole new level last year. Shocking. So, okay, last year, to fund my Edinburgh Fringe run, I went on a clinical trial, right? So I went on this trial where they gave me malaria. This is true. And never got a laugh before, but there's something for everyone on this show. No, seriously, I promise you. I went on this clinical trial that gave me malaria and actually it got a bit out of hand. It resulted in a sort of touching. It was a near death experience. Right. I bring this up because I really felt like last year after the, after everything that happened, I felt like I really earned my time at the Edinburgh Fringe. You know, I was hungry for life. I wanted to do my show, I wanted to watch other people's shows, I wanted to hang out. You know, I was having a great time. And in the spirit of triumph, on about day five of the Edinburgh Fringe, I thought to myself, what would Edward Dando do? And I got myself the modern day equivalent of oysters. I got myself some cheesy chips. I love cheesy chips. And I ate these cheesy chips slightly too close to going to bed and I woke up, unsurprisingly, I woke up in the most extraordinary pain. It was this horrible, dreadful stomach ache. It was like someone was lying on top of me, you know, which they were, got them off and then. And. But it was awful. Stomach ache, kind of nasty, like headache, a fever. It was, it was dreadful. I just remember, I remember lying there in bed and thinking, okay, I just need to get myself to the bathroom and I will eventually pass these cheesy chips. And I'm in a lot of pain. And actually I phoned 111, right? And they said, how bad is the pain? I said, it's pretty bad. It's not as bad as malaria, right? They said, what an incredibly strange thing to say. And they said, look, if it's manageable, the chances are you've probably got food poisoning. I Thought, fine. Food poisoning. I don't need to cancel any shows because of food poisoning. I've had malaria. I've had a proper disease. I've been looking forward to the Edinburgh fringe for months and months and months. I really want to do my show. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna cancel the show because of food poisoning, for God's sake. So I went on stage, but over the next few days, as I was doing these performances, basically my body started to shut down, basically. So I would sleep for hours. I'd sleep for sort of 18 hours or whatever, and I'd wake up, I'd take all available pain relief. I go and do the show. Straight afterwards, I collapse, and I'd sleep for another, like, 18, 19, 20 hours, you know, about five days into the illness, I remember phoning up my mum and saying, this is really bad now. This is the worst pain I've ever been in. She said, how bad is it actually? And I remember saying to my mum, I feel like I want to die. Like, I feel like I want to be dead. And she said, you said that two weeks ago when you lost your phone, and I did. So. I'm not a reliable narrator of any of this next bit. Okay, take this with a pinch of salt. Now, I went to this pharmacy to get more laxatives, which is a five minute walk away. And I did that walk in 45 minutes. So I thought, okay, right, I'm gonna have to go to the hospital. And hospitals are difficult environments, aren't they? You know, because also, the hospital as an adult is a place where you have to kind of advocate for yourself, right? Which basically means doing an impression of your own mum, you know, and that's adulthood, isn't it? Sadly, you know, you just. You go around as an adult doing sort of impressions of your own parents until eventually it sticks. And then you kind of. The other day I roasted a chicken. You know, it was like a drag act or something. Fuck's going on here? Am I in the opening number of a musical or something bizarre? I went into this A and E waiting room and eventually they said, right, the doctor will see you now. And this doctor, she took me into a curtained off area and she said, look, I don't know what's wrong with you, but she said, the good news is for things like abdominal pain, she said, you've actually, you've left it a very long time to come in. I've left it seven or eight days, something like that. So she said, because you've left it so long. It's unlikely to be anything that serious with these abdominal things. If it's something like a. If it's appendicitis or if it's a perforated bowel or something like that, you'd have been dead by now, right? So she said, actually, the fact that you're still here means it's probably quite mild. It'll be an infection, we'll figure out what it is, we'll give you some tablets and you can go home. You can probably do your show tonight, if not tomorrow. Great, fine. Took me for a load of scans, figure out what was going on. And she came back with quite a confused, quite grave look on her face. And she said, okay, you're not going to believe this, but it is appendicitis. And I said, oh, isn't that funny? And she said, no. So she said this in her words, she said, your appendix has not just become infected. She said, it hasn't even just ruptured, which is the usual sort of worst case scenario for appendicitis. She said, your appendix ruptured days ago and your appendix has now, in her words, obliterated. She said, you, appendix has completely fallen apart and it is now floating around your body. She said, you are in a state called intra abdominal sepsis. And she said, we need to operate on you in the next few hours or you're going to die. We need to get you to the theatre right now. I said, that's what I've been trying to tell you, get me to the theater. But look, I'm not going to pretend it wasn't scary because obviously it was scary and because suddenly it was a real life emergency. You know, they put me in this hospital bed and they bumped me up the kind of urgent surgery list and stuff. And I woke up from the surgery and the surgeon said, this is an exact quote. He said, yeah, when we opened you up, we were all a bit like, yike. Now they don't know what causes appendicitis. And it's been suggested that excessively fatty diets might lead to appendicitis. I was essentially almost killed by my own gluttony. And then he told me off, basically. He got cross with me and he said in my 25 year career as a general surgeon, he said, I've never seen someone come in that late with appendicitis because of this kind of dogged attitude I had to doing the show every day, I didn't want to cancel it. And he said that was, that was dangerous and it was stupid and it was reckless and it was immature. And he said, if you, if you'd have left it one day more, you, you'd be dead, you wouldn't be here. And that'd be it. It's really, really hard to hear that and not think he's saying that. I came in at exactly. Just saying. Yeah. So I was right not to cancel yesterday show. Thank you. My timing's immaculate. I was incredibly lucky. I feel very. I feel incredibly lucky to survive, you know, Anyway, right. Edward Dando. So Edward Dando died when he was my age. Edward Dando died when he was 29 years old. He was also a man of timing, actually, because he died just as oysters were starting to become over farmed and they were falling out of fashion in London and oyster restaurants were starting to close and go out of business. And it'd be really easy to think of the story of Edward Dando as the story of a man who never learned his lesson. But I don't think that's true. I think Edward Dando did learn his lesson. I think Edward Dando resolved every single time to continue doing the thing that he absolutely loved more than anything else. And as I lay there in that hospital bed, anxious to come back to the Edinburgh fringe, I thought of Edward Dando in solitary confinement. And I hope that every single time he thought to himself, when I get out of here, do you know what I really fancy? And I hope that for him every time it was worth the wait. Because I can promise you from the bottom of my heart, this certainly has been. I beg you, please be an Edward Dando. Eat the cheesy chips, drink the champagne, refuse to go hungry in a land of plenty, even if a thing like sepsis or prison gets in your way. And for God's sake, let's go and get some oysters. Thank you very.
