Well, wasn't April bloody fantastic? I had a huge, fat, endangered WHALE of a time. My birthday was great, despite Sir Skanksalot Antonello from the Karakas Bar, who decided to replace us with a burlesque stripper but didn't decide to tell us about it, thus earning himself the accolade of Wanker of the Year. Then it was Easter, followed by Ben's birthday. I've never had so much fun in one month. All I have to do now is to make sure I don't catch the swine flu.....

We had another English Class gig at the East of Eden. It was brilliant. We had not one but TWO surprise guests – the lovely Paul Salamone and the bloody fantastic Rico. Yeah. My son, Rico. What happened was that I thought he was staying at his dad's, only he wasn't. His dad brought him home to me at 7:20 in the evening. So we put a tie on him and sloped off to Friedrichshain, feeding him Brezels and choco milk on the way.

“You can perform if you want, Rico,” we told him.

“What can I do?” he asked, anxiously.

“You can do jokes or a poem,” we replied.

“I'm going to say that a hat went on a man's head,” he announced, carefully.

“Yeah, that's a good direction to go in,” Ben said.

I just totally thought that he would chicken out when he arrived. UH-UH.

“Mum, when am I on?’ That was just about the only sentence I got out of him for the next hour and a half.

“Mum, am I still allowed to go on the stage and talk into the microphone? Mum, when's it my turn to talk into the microphone? Mum, when am I going to go on?”

In the end, I whispered to him: Go on then. He bounced his way through the crowd and clamoured onto the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemens!” He announced grandly. “Fire is gonna come! You're all gonna die! Don't laugh – it's not a joke! Why are you laughing?”

Pretty dark stuff, hey? What I really liked was the way he talked about it afterward, like a right little performer: “Mum, I was the best, wasn't I? Did you hear them laughing? Mum, we were all funny, weren't we? And I was the best? Did you think it were funny, when I said about the fire?”

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