I do apologise for the lack of a blog yesterday, but in my defence I was knackered from stress by the time I got home. Anyway, here’s the events and more that caused this.

Let’s start with the boring and inane stuff that happened, which started when I got home last night. I found that the forum for Angry (Feet) had been transferred across only to find it didn’t work properly. Luckily, being the geek I am I found out what was the problem, despite it being something I’d not done before, and fixed it. Yay.

The rest of the day was pretty boring and bog standard up until approximately 4:30pm, when I set off to The Lowry with Alick to see Rhod Gilbert. The first sign that things wouldn’t go to plan was when we spotted a sign saying that there was going to be no trams going into Piccadilly after 11pm. We took this into consideration and adjusted things accordingly, thinking everything would be fine and that we’d still be able to make the last train back at 11:42pm.

So we got to The Lowry and met with Kim and Hannah, who I hadn’t seen since the end of October/beginning of November so that was nice, and they duly informed me about the support act Lloyd Langford.

Not knowing what to expect I think is the best way to approach a comedian you’ve not seen live before because live is when a stand-up should be at their best. I have to say, I quite enjoyed Lloyd’s half-hour set and his rambling anecdotal style and I’ve definitely made a mental note to see him again.

In terms of a rambling style though, there’s not much than can come close to Rhod. He came bounding on to the stage after the interval hyper on caffeine, which in all made for a lively gig. The audience too were lively and animated, regularly talking to Rhod, including one discussion about the Welsh language and how he has to do a stand-up gig on Monday entirely in Welsh. I also managed to surprise myself and actually offered to talk to Rhod after he asked if anyone had seen the show at Edinburgh, which is most unlike me. Maybe it’s just because he exudes a lovely personality.

After 45 minutes of back and forward banter, not much of the actual show had been performed by Rhod so he called for a five minute interval and afterwards he completed it. I know I’ve seen it before but it was still funny, which is another sign of a good comedian in my eyes.

Anyway, this is generally where the stress starts. Rhod didn’t finish til 11pm and we had to get our train in 42 minutes and the tram isn’t exactly the fastest mode of transport, plus combined with the replacement bus service it was probably gonna take longer than that to get to the station. In a stroke of luck we managed to hail a taxi, who got us to the station for about 11:15pm, plenty of time to catch the last train, except the bloody thing wasn’t running was it? The closest thing available was the 11:19pm to Huddersfield, giving us four minutes to run to the platform furthest away from the main concourse, which wasn’t easy in my boots.

We made it there only to find that the sodding thing’s running late. Right about now I’m panicking because I’m thinking we’re going to miss the replacement bus service to Leeds, which according to the timetable left 9 minutes after this train should have arrived. 25 minutes later the people at the station decided it was probably best to commandeer another train for this journey so we were ushered to another platform to get on the train waiting there.

Right now, I’m clearly prepared for a night in Huddersfield or something but when we got on the train the conductor announced that for passengers going to Leeds and York that the rail replacement service would still be running when we got there, which was a huge relief for me and even more relief was provided when we actually caught the bus back.

Now, obviously you could point the finger at Rhod for over-running and not finishing when he was expecting to but I’m not going to because I wouldn’t have changed his show for the world and I’m glad I didn’t miss a minute of it. I would like to blame public transport though for not running to the timetables expected. Had things been running smoothly, we could have probably got the tram direct to Piccadilly and got there in time for the last train.

Right, I’m off to write an angry letter to the train company.