Translator: Riaki Poništ Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
I'd like to start, if I may,
by enlisting the help of that man there.
Would you mind standing up?
What' your name, sir?
Audience: Tim.
Tony Hawks: Tim.
Good English name, is it, or not?
German name - okay.
(Laughter)
Tim, what I'm going to do
is I'm going to throw this ball to you like that.
I want you not to catch it;
I want you to head it back to me like that, okay?
(Laughter)
Can you do that?
I mean, Germans are supposed to be good at football.
(Laughter)
I think they won the World Cup once,
I'm not sure.
Here we go.
Yes, very good, okay.
(Applause)
Don't sit down yet, Tim, I haven't finished with you.
(Laughter)
This time, I'm going to throw it again, and when you head it,
I want you to say the word "kühlschrank."
(Laugher)
Okay, "kühlschrank."
Here we give it a go.
Tim: Kühlschrank.
Tony: Oh, very good, well done, Tim.
(Applause)
You're done now.
(Laughter)
Your part is not that big, please sit down.
(Laughter)
But thank you very much.
I think you will all agree that what we did then was very silly.
I've got a question of you.
How many people here have done something really silly in the last month?
(Laughter)
Quite a lot of you, actually.
(Laughter)
What a very silly audience you are.
(Laugher)
Are you sure you've come to the right event?
(Laughter)
Anyway, I'm going to share an idea with you that might surprise some of you.
The idea is that silliness is really a very important thing
for us to keep in touch with.
In the next few minutes, I hope to show you
that silliness or playfulness can, not only help to keep us happy,
it can change our lives,
and that playing is not something that we should stop doing
once we become adults.
I have a motto in my life and it's this:
"You are never too old to be told off by a park keeper."
(Laughter)
Why?
Because if you stop playing,
you may miss out on some important insights
into how to navigate your way through life.
Let me explain.
I did something really very silly indeed in 1997.
I hitchhiked all the way around the circumference of Ireland
with a fridge.
(Laughter)
Okay, why did I do this?
I did this because the first time I was ever in Ireland,
I was picked up at Dublin Airport and driven north.
40 minutes into this journey, I saw, by the side of the road,
a man hitchhiking with a full-size fridge next to him.
I couldn't believe my eyes.
I said to the Irish guy that was driving me,
"Did I see that right?
Was that guy hitching with a fridge?"
And he just went, "Oh yeah."
(Laughter)
He never said another word about it.
(Laughter)
I thought, "Ireland is a magical place, isn't it?"
(Laughter)
If someone hitching with a fridge isn't even a conversation point.
(Laughter)
So, for a while, I became obsessed with this story.
I used to tell it quite a lot when I was at a dinner party.
And I drink; I drunk quite a lot of beer.
I don't know what it was, probably local Bavarian beer.
I was talking nonsense and I said,
"I think Ireland is the one place in the world
where you could hitchhike with a fridge."
(Laughter)
And I ended up making a £100 bet with this friend of mine, Kevin,
that I could do this.
And I woke up in the morning, and of course I didn't need to do it.
I could have got out of it, but I decided that I would do this.
I had a month to do it in so I decided to take a month off.
Why?
I think it was because I really wanted to see what would happen
if you spent one month doing something fundamentally silly.
(Laughter)
So, I did that.
I bought myself a half-size fridge,
one that would sit in saloon cars nice and easily,
and I got myself over to Dublin,
put myself by the side of the road
in the place where I thought I'd seen this original old man
who'd been hitching before when I saw the fridge man there.
It didn't get off to a great start.
In this picture, I think I'm much happier than I was on that first morning
this was taken towards the end of my trip.
Unusually for Ireland, it was chucking it down with rain when I began,
and no one was stopping, and I felt quite a lonely figure there.
You can just see me there with my fridge.
But I was stood there for hours getting wetter and wetter,
and no one was stopping, and I was thinking,
"This is the most stupid thing I have ever done in my life."
(Laughter)
But I stuck with it, I persevered, and eventually somebody stopped.
And everything began to change from then on.
It was very interesting.
One of the people that pick me up told me I should call in to RTE radio,
the national radio station in Ireland, and have a conversation
with the mid-morning DJ there called Gerry Ryan.
Now, I spoke to this guy on air, I told him what I was doing,
and amazingly, he seemed to understand what I was doing in a way that I didn't.
(Laughter)
He said, "Tony, it sounds like a completely purposeless idea,
but a damn fine one."
(Laughter)
He said, "Call in every couple of days and tell us how you're getting on."
We did this; we had these conversations.
And soon, people were looking out for me,
(Laughter)
to try and stop and give me a lift.
All kinds of people, from strange travelers
to people who were delivering goods around the country,
they all wanted to sign my fridge with good wishes.
This man here even drove 45 minutes out of his way to pick me up.
(Laughter)
He'd heard me on the radio and he took a new route so he could get me.
So, it was an extraordinary thing.
Of course, the one thing that the Irish are known for
is their hospitality.
This next picture, I think,
sums up the spirit of the journey that I went on.
(Laughter)
It's drink out of focus, really.
(Laughter)
Nearly always I was looking at this picture,
roughly like that before I went to bed.
But they were very hospitable.
Each journey would normally begin - each day would follow a similar pattern.
I would hitch,
I'd get roughly to where I wanted to be,
and then I'd just go to a pub, and order a pint,
and then wait to see what happened.
Normally there'd be three or four old guys sitting around this pub.
It was quite unusual for them to see a man come in
with a fridge on a trolley,
(Laughter)
and a rucksack.
But they didn't sort of rush up to me, no.
They didn't pry.
So, they would look at me for quite some time,
and then eventually one of them would be nudged,
and the guy would come off and say, "Is that a fridge?"
(Laughter)
and I'd say, "Yes," and then they'd just go and sit back down again.
(Laughter)
Another 10 minutes would pass,
and one of the other ones would come up and say,
"What the feck are you doing with the fridge?"
(Laughter)
"Well I'm doing it to win a bet."
"How much was the bet?"
"100 pounds."
"How much was the fridge?"
(Laughter)
(Applause)
"130 pounds."
(Laughter)
"Jeez, you're an eejit, what are you drinking? Come on now, come on."
(Laughter)
The fact of the matter is that once the Irish people
had realized I'd spent more on the fridge than the bet was for,
They simply couldn't do enough for me.
(Laughter)
I'd stumbled on the perfect place for my experiment.
The Irish people embraced silly eccentricity.
(Laughter)
It was quite wonderful.
They wanted to humanize the fridge too.
I think in this picture you can see that the fridge is on a bar stool.
It wasn't to start with; it was on the floor.
But we were all talking, and the landlord said
"You can't leave it down on the floor now.
(Laughter)
Come on, put it up on the stool, let it join in with everyone."
(Laughter)
The little old fellow, he was looking at the fridge for some time,
and then he suddenly just went,
"Ah sure now, it's nice to see it out of context."
(Laughter)
I finally ended up in a place called Sligo.
By this point, I'd become a little bit well-known with this journey.
I come into this pub, a bit of a party had developed,
and people were buying drinks and signing the fridge,
and this man marched across the room to me.
He said, "Tony, I just want to thank you."
I said, "Why?"
He said, "Well, look at the faces of the people who are all around you.
Look at the happiness that you and your fridge have created."
(Laughter)
He said, "You and your fridge are spreading joy."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
The landlord of this pub, he was a champion surfer.
I said, "I'd like to have a go at surfing,"
and a little old guy next to me said,
"Well, it wouldn't be right, Tony, for you to do it
and for the fridge not to have a go now."
(Laughter)
So, a discussion started
as to whether you could actually take a fridge surfing,
(Laughter)
and it was decided that you could,
because they have a good center of gravity.
(Laughter)
I thought this was just the drink talking, but in the morning, we did set off.
(Laughter)
That's Bingo the landlord, the champion surfer.
He managed to get up on the fridge,
(Laughter)
and surfing on a wave, so it is possible.
They also wanted the fridge christened and said,
"You've got to give it a name."
So, they called it "Saoirse," which is Gaelic for freedom,
because after all, it is a very free fridge, so that was it.
We had a little ceremony outside the pub.
Then someone said, "You should get the mother superior
from Kylemore Abbey to bless your fridge."
(Laughter)
So, I wheeled the fridge up to Kylemore Abbey
and there was a nun at the door
and I said, "Would the mother superior consider blessing my fridge?"
(Laughter)
and she said, "Yes, let's just go and get her for you,"
(Laughter)
and there she is just blessing the fridge.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
But it was around about this time, I sat in the hills near Lake Kalani
and I thought, "What is going on here?
How can this be going so well?"
(Laughter)
I was on such a high and I came up with a philosophy of life
based on this journey which I now call "fridge philosophy."
The philosophy is this: you take the journey to be a metaphor for life.
So, here's a map of Ireland; I was starting in Dublin,
and I was going to go all the way around the coast and end up in Dublin.
So, Dublin was birth, but Dublin was also going to be death.
But we've already established that there was no economic reason
for me making this journey.
I'd already spent more on the fridge than the bet was for.
So, the only reason for making this journey
was to make it an uplifting and positive journey
that spread joy as it went around.
I thought, "That's not such a bad way of living your life, is it?"
I also realized that there were zen aspects, if you like, to hitching.
Each day as I set my fridge down by the side of the road,
I only had the vaguest sense of where I was going to be in the evening.
But I knew I could only control one thing,
and that was what direction me in my fridge were going in.
Worrying about where I was going to be and at what time was a futile activity,
so I didn't engage in it.
The other thing I learned
was that someone will always come along and help you.
I was hitching - yes, sometimes I had to wait a very long time,
but even that was a good thing
because it meant I could take in the surroundings around me.
I could have a think about where I was in life, come up with crazy ideas
like fridge philosophy.
So, that's how I like to live my life now.
I like to just let it unfold.
And I still kept silliness in my life.
Quite recently, I cycled from coast to coast in the UK with a pig.
(Laughter)
Admittedly, it was a small pig.
(Laughter)
I don't know whether you can just see it tucked inside my coat there.
It was a baby micro pig.
So, I did cheat, but we raised over £10,000 for a care center
that I started in Moldova for children with cerebral palsy.
So, I would like to say that the important thing
is to try and keep the balance right between silliness and being sensible.
Be sensible in your life, of course, but keep a moment aside for the silliness
because that's the part that will very often give to other people.
So, to recap, Dublin is birth, Dublin is death,
but all you have in between is this journey,
so make it fun and don't take it all too seriously.
Just before I go, I am going to throw into the audience some balls.
Your job is to organize a silly game as you leave the theater.
Whoever catches one of these, you're in charge of organizing the games.
(Applause)
Tim, you'd better have one.
(Laughter)
Thanks a lot, goodbye.
(Applause)