Last Saturday was National Tulip Day, marking the official start of the tulip season here in the Netherlands. Like most official days, this one is bullshit. While it is true that from this time of year you can find cheap and plentiful tulips, that’s only because farmers grow them in greenhouses. Tulips don’t naturally bloom until March. 

This does not deter 18,000 lunatics who descend on Amsterdam’s Museumplein and queue in the rain for hours to claim their 20 free tulips. People are idiots for free stuff. 

While the tulip industry was keen to pretend spring has arrived, the weather had other ideas. The country was battered by two storms in three days, knocking the power out in much of the city twice, like it’s 1974. 

Some things I did this week 

On the back of the arguable success of my PowerPoint-based routine at Boom Chicago last year, and because the advert fell into my Instagram feed after I’d had a glass of wine, I signed up to a ‘comedy crash course’ from an organisation called Funny Women. 

I had no idea what to expect. I don’t have any particular ambition to be a comedian, but I do a lot of presenting for work, I think I’m reasonably funny, and I figured I might learn a few useful tips. And falling that I might have a laugh. 

And it has been an absolute delight! Over four one-hour lunchtime sessions a string of brilliant female comics shared their insights on getting started, on finding ideas, and on making those ideas funnier. One session demystified the process of getting started on the comedy circuit to the point that it might even be something I’d conceivably do. Another walked us though a series of exercises to find and develop comic material, a process she called ‘finding your funny’ (which, on reflection, sounds like something the nurse does in a cervical exam). 

One of the comics led a session on improv. I hate improv, and I especially hate the kind people who do improv. At my local comedy theatre when greeted with the words “we’ve switched out this evening’s performance for the improv show, is that ok?”, I said “no”, got a refund, and went home rather than watch a bunch of highly indebted drama school graduates wang on for an hour. 

So now I’m doubly annoyed at how much I enjoyed it. 

But the best thing about all of this was the other people. My eight fellow attendees were some of the sharpest, kindest, most encouraging and utterly hilarious women I’ve met in a long time. Over the course of the week we’ve (over)shared, given each other helpful and supportive feedback and made each other belly laugh.

This culminated today in a final showcase, for which we’d each prepared a couple of minutes’ material. My fellow apprentice comics had me laughing out loud on the class politics of Muller Fruit Corner, Turkish barbers’ ear-hair-removal techniques, aspirational dog breeds, and celebrating your birthday when you’re north of 40.  

They say you should write about what you know… so I did a three minute monologue using material that began life as a LinkedIn post.  

I enjoyed the whole thing immensely and am still buzzing at what a joy it all was. 

What I’m reading 

Following on from last week’s tome (Chris Bryant’s Code of Conduct: Why We Need To Fix Parliament) I smashed through Rory Stewart’s Politics On The Edge. I hoped for a counterweight to his diagnosis, but this turned out to be a series of case studies of the very failures Bryant talked about. A reflection on the rot at the heart of British politics. 

The book offered thoroughly dispiriting insights into the chaos of cabinet posts. It exposes Johnson, Priti Patel and Liz Truss, all of he worked under at different points of his political career, as publicity-obsessed lightweights blessed (cursed?) with preternatural gifts for oversimplification. 

But what stuck with me most was the chapter on his spell as Prisons Minister. I’ve read a bit about the trail of disaster wrought by the botched privatisation of the Probation Service (see Ian Dunt’s How Westminster Works And Why It Doesn’t for the full, horrifying tale of Chris Grayling’s incompetence). But this memoir blew open the human consequences. Stewart describes his feeling of shame as he apologised in person to the mother of a woman who was violently raped and murdered by a man who, were it not for that failure, would have been behind bars. Political failure has a human cost.

Rory writes thoughtfully on the monumental mistakes of the invasion of Iraq. It’s made me reflect on the same. I marched against the war, but later – when I did some work in and with the Iraqi parliament and spoke to people there – came to believe toppling Saddam was right in principle. People I spoke to in Baghdad felt bringing freedom to the country was on balance a good thing, if flawed in execution. But that was over a decade ago, and the events of the years since have forced me to rethink. So it was helpful to read the mental journey of someone who was much more closely involved. 

Connections 

Anna Cupani slid into my DMs to say she was in Amsterdam for a few days. Ended up in my local spending two hours chatting about mid-life career changes, language as a medium of exchange, and working with organisations that are designed around a profession.  

Something I learned 

Tulips don’t strictly continue to grow after they’re cut, but they appear to because of two phenomena. The cells in the stem elongate as they absorb water, which makes the stem get longer. At the same time, the cells in the tulip stem continue to respond to light (what’s called phototropism). This response can cause the stem to bend towards the light, and it may appear as though the flower is continuing to grow despite technically being dead. 

One theme that threaded through our comedic conversations this week was the precipitous decline in fucks women have to give as we slide into middle age. I thought about the nine of us, like tulips, responding by growing towards the light.