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Daniel Sloss {COMEDY}
About to hit the Fringe for his third full solo show, 20-year-old Daniel Sloss is marching ever onwards to comedy icon status. For now though, he still lives with his mum in East Wemyss, Fife. Brian Donaldson is taken on a stroll round the spots that Sloss (accompanied by frisky family dog, Sooty) holds dearest to his heart
THE BEACH EAST WEMYSS
I remember when I was about eight, we had a French au pair come to ours for a few years running. This is not in a posh ‘oh we need an assistant’ way, he was a French student trying to learn English and, of all places, he came to Fife. My mum worked for the UN occasionally, and she met him through that and said, ‘Och, come and stay with us’.
So he came over and I fucking hated his guts. He cooked the worst possible food at nine o’clock at night so I was in bed, starving. But every day he took us down to the beach and used to find these huge crabs under the rocks. Actually, maybe they weren’t that big, but I remember holding one in my two hands and chasing my friend Craig around. Once when I was young, a friend of mine nearly drowned near here, which was one of the most traumatising events of my life. He was ten and we were just running around like twats – this was just before Xbox – and he ran off and this really big wave took him into the water. I was on the beach like a big girl: ‘I dinnae want to get my phone wet’; actually, it wouldn’t have been a phone, it was probably a pager. I was such a posh little prick, I had this pager so my mum could tell me when to come home.
So, yeah, he fell in and got up and got knocked back in. It was awesome. I can’t say that I saved his life, though I have had my life saved before at Leven Swimming Pool. I was in primary six or seven with my friend Kyle; when he was ten he was about 5 ft 9 and I was a midget waiting for a growth spurt. Though now I need another half inch and I’ll be six foot. Anyway, he dared me to swim to the other side when the waves were going but they took me under and Kyle just stepped into the water, walked over to me and picked me up.
WEMYSS CAVES
We’d come down to the caves on school trips and learn about stuff; Macduff Castle is not far from here. It used to be a lot nicer when I was younger, but there are a lot of neds. A couple of years ago, there was a police-enforced curfew that happened in Methil, Buckhaven, Leven and Kirkcaldy but not here so all the neds would get on a bus and come here. They obviously didn’t want the usual stabby places being so stabby and maybe just spread it about. We used to come here every New Year because we could get wasted and see all the fireworks from Edinburgh. It’s sad because you used to get really awesome cave paintings in there, like Vikings
and Thor and Odin and stuff and right beside it, it would say ‘Alan fingered Debbie here’. You think, wow, wonder how long that goes back? Some fossilised swords and a can of Tennent’s. But we were pretty rubbish teenagers; we’d come round here and get drunk but make sure we had bin bags to tidy up after us. We are the first proper generation of such shit kids, we are just mostly bastards. It’s so cool to be anti- social? Is it, is it cool to just piss everywhere? I remember getting on a bus and little old ladies moving away from you: I didn’t even want your purse you bitch. I’ve been jumped several times though I’ve never been hit; each time, my mate little Ally is the one who gets hit.
THE DEN EAST WEMYSS Oh my god! This used to be a park! I’ve clearly not been here for years. You’d regularly have balls kicked over from the school and we’d slide down the hills to get them back. There was a big tyre swing there, that’s where I asked out my first girlfriend. I don’t remember that hill being there; that’s new. There was the aerial flying fox and some swings in a t-section and you’d injure yourself daily, smacking each other in the face with swings, kicking each other off the tyre swing.
F E S T I V A L
4–11 Aug 2011 THE LIST 25