“Then he got incredibly sick, then disabled, and then he died. “I have a potentially unique perspective in the sense that as my career was taking off and I was being surrounded by wealthier and wealthier people, my son got sick too,” he says.
Delaney had campaigned for Labour with a moving video extolling the brilliance of our NHS. When we meet – slightly more boringly for coffee in a bar near his home in north London – the 42-year-old comic is still raw from December’s election results. “He’s just Canoe Cheese Man to me.”Īnd yet Delaney is reminded of the guy’s impact on a regular basis. “I don’t even remember his name,” he laughs. I remember saying: ‘Man, this is good,’ and he said: ‘Yeah, food tastes better when you share it.’” It was in that moment that Delaney believes his core principles were formed. And the friend I was with took out his cheese and a knife, sliced off a piece and gave me some. But in his head he’s there now, reminiscing about a pivotal point in his life. Not literally that would be a weird place to do an interview. R ob Delaney is on a canoe, sailing down the North American waterways with a massive lump of cheese in his mouth.
