Frankie Boyle has been live tweeting his hunger strike in solidarity with Guantánamo Bay prisoner Shaker Aamer, claiming it's starting to feel "a bit like being drunk".
The Scottish comedian stopped eating two days ago after Aamer's lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who had already been fasting for seven days, passed the baton on to him.
Frankie Boyle
Aamer is the last British resident imprisoned in Guantánamo, where he has been held without charge since 2002.
On day two of his hunger strike, Boyle tweeted:
He previously posted:
Writing for The Huffington Post UK, Stafford Smith explained why he is glad the controversial comic has joined the strike for Aamer:
So for me, the strike is over: not for any particularly good reason, just because it has gone on a week, and it is time to pass the baton over to Frankie Boyle. I was not sure when I began how long I would go for, since I had never foregone food for 48 hours before. I am satisfied with a week - it is longer than I expected to last, though less time than I could have.
Meanwhile, others are waiting with varying degrees of eagerness in the wings. Actually, Frankie's action is more important than mine. If Twitter followers are the measure of the man, then with almost one and a half million, Frankie is almost exactly a thousand times me (you might consider being one of the 1,401,000 people who follow the progress of his own strike this week - @frankieboyle). One purpose of these symbolic actions is to provoke debate, to press President Obama to fulfil his post-election promise, and I suspect Frankie is better at doing that than I am. I was touched this afternoon to receive a message from the actress Julie Christie, a long time patron of Reprieve, saying she could do the week after Frankie, before Rob DelNaja does his bit. We live in a celebrity world, and there is nothing wrong with that so long as celebrities use their notoriety for a good purpose.