Thank God for the Eurovision Song Contest.
Just when I needed something to stop me going completely bonkers, the world gave me something even sillier than the inside of my head.
I knew COVID-19 was snaking around town but I thought I was safe because I was treble jabbed and my friends are all over 70 and we just hold Zoom parties.
I am not an acid raver anymore. I gave that up when my shoes melted. Or was it the clocks?
Anyway, on Monday last week I woke up feeling weirder than normal. My head was a 4B2 hardwood plank, which was sort of normal, but I had a sniffle and a cough. Then I felt cold. Then a friend I had spent the morning with on Friday discussing the glory days of acid raves called to say he had COVID.
That was it. I did a test and sure enough, two purple-black lines appeared.
So — back down into the lockdown dungeon for a week you naughty, naughty social raver.
I’d been there before — the chains were still warm from last time. Everything was under control: coffee, champagne, Weet-Bix, low-fat liver diet dogfood.
But this time it was different. I’ve been off the leash for nearly two years and the loungeroom couldn’t hold me anymore. By Tuesday I was pacing the kitchen like a lonely bin chicken.
By Wednesday I was in the back garden looking for skinks and blades of grass longer than three centimetres.
By Thursday I was in the front garden looking wistfully up the street like I did when I was four and all the big people were off to school to have fun.
By Friday things were desperate. I considered doing some gardening.
Then I remembered the first semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest was on that evening. Finally, I had something to live for.
Eurovision is something I remember watching as a teenager in the early ’70s and laughing cruelly at songs with vacuous lyrics like Lulu’s Boom Bang-a-Bang or Luxembourg’s entry, which consisted of the line ‘Papa Penguin’ sung about 40 times until your piña colada boiled in the glass.
Then there’s the unforgettable 2012 ‘Bum Song’ from Austria’s Trackshittaz (I’m not making this up), which included the unforgettable lines “your bum has feelings, your bum is part of you, don’t put it on chairs, your bum has an opinion, yeah”.
Cole Porter eat your lyrical heart out.
This is exactly the sort of thing you need during COVID isolation.
The 2023 Eurovision contest was broadcast over three nights until the final on Sunday, May 14, and it did not disappoint.
Croatia’s entry had a band of raving führers who forgot to wear pants, Finnish rapper Käärijiä wore fluorescent green puffer sleeves and delivered the inspirational chorus ‘Cha Cha Cha’, Germany’s Lord of the Lost delivered an impressive Night of the Living Dead performance on amphetamines. Australia’s Voyager were brilliant but just not nonsensical enough for the really silly stakes.
By comparison, Sweden’s winning entry from Loreen was positively banal.
By the end of the competition on Sunday night, I was drained of the humdrum and my universe was a surreal, madcap multicolour landscape.
I was ready to enter the world again, COVID-free but jabbed with a serious dose of nonsense.