Today I’ve noticed a load of small things that, had I been Mark, I could’ve probably strung out into long, captivating rambly anecdotes, but I’m not and they’ll probably seem even more insignificant when I write them down in my oh so uninteresting way. I don’t care though, I’m writing about them anyway.

First thing’s first. My keen eye started when I arrived at the train station to get into Leeds. For some reason there was no one at the train station, which I thought was a bit odd; maybe all the trains had been cancelled and someone had decided not to tell me. Well, I thought there was no one at the station until I spotted two chavvy guys on the other platform, nothing particularly special until I noticed that they were actually kissing. Now I’ve nothing against gays but you’ve got to agree that their culture doesn’t exactly sit right with the chav culture so I guess it was a bit of a shock to see this. I was even more surprised when they stopped kissing and it turned out one of them was just an incredibly butch lass with her hair scraped back as tightly as she could get it to her scalp. How someone can find that attractive I don’t know.

Anyway, rambly anecdote over. Let’s talk about what I did this evening. You know I was at the station to get to Leeds but why was I going to Leeds? I was, of course, going to see Mark Watson, hence the title of this post. I’d review the show but there’s not really much to say when most of the show was what I’d seen before at Edinburgh, and even at Edinburgh I’d heard some of the jokes on his radio show, but nevertheless he was still brilliant. Good jokes never grow old after all.

I will mention the bit directly after the interval though, when Mark asked everyone how their interval was. The response was pretty much a positive one until someone piped up that there’s hadn’t been so great having found out that Jeremy Beadle’s dead. Now that was a bit surreal. Mark then announced to the entire audience that it was actually true, which makes the whole thing seems even odder to me. What a way to find out that a bloke who came to your primary school, and, let’s face it, the only decent presenter of You’ve Been Framed has died.

Anyway, Mark was flogging his book after the show, which I think was a bit of a con, having seen him perform comedy to buy his book and then find out it’s nothing like his comedic style; in fact, it’s not even fair to suggest that it’s a comedy. Still, it is a bloody good book though. I still find it weird, when I think back to buying it at the book launch during his 24 hour show, that Tim read a passage out that was written by a German character. The idea of it being read with an Australian accent somehow doesn’t sit right with me, but I thought about it some more and I remembered that said passages are translated from German and so it could possibly be read in any dialect. My mind’s odd like this.

Back to the story, I took my poetry book with me for him to sign, which he duly did and I asked him something Kirsty wanted me to and Mark asked who this friend of mine was and so I obviously said it was Kirsty. He thought about this for a bit as if he recognised the name but could only vaguely place it so I helpfully said, “Yeah, it’s probably that Kirsty” XD

Also, a really spooky coincidence. I don’t think I’ve ever met another person with their name spelt the exact same way as mine as there are just so many different ways of spelling it but just after I’d got my book signed, the next person in the queue asked Mark to make out his scrawl to, who could be, the exact same person. Creepy.