The 16th of July. We had a plan. It went really rather well. Let me tell it to you and annotate it with photos.

I got myself to the train station for 8am to get a train to Darlington so I could hop on to the train to Derby, where I would meet Shell. This went swimmingly and at about 11am we were heading to Cambridge, listening to The Lost Weblog of Scrooby Trevithick to start with, to meet Sorrel.

Sorrel was successfully met at about 1:30pm and we then had a tea break at a nearby service station that proved to be incredibly annoying. The place where we got ourselves a cuppa from had the slogan, “Your handmade coffee awaits.” Think about it. It doesn’t make sense! Maybe if it was “Your handmade coffee waits” then it’d be fine but a thing can’t await without having something for it to await for so we decided to have fun and make up things for it to be awaiting like a handsome prince or someone with a decent grasp of the English language.

From there we headed on down to London, where we parked at North Ealing tube station, picked up a few copies of the Australian Times to give to Tim before heading on the tube to our Travelodge. That was a bit of a fiasco to get to. On the map it was marked as being on the same side as the station so we stayed on the same side and then noticed that it was on the other side of the road with no foreseeable point in the road at which we could cross. On the way out we learned of the subway near the station, which would’ve been useful had we known about it before. Still, not the end of the world and we all survived the extra bit of exercise.

After a bit of time spent in the Travelodge we headed out to the venue, which involved us getting stuck at Ealing Common station for quite a while as all the trains that went past were on the line we didn’t want. We then threatened to get a taxi and lo and behold, our train pulled up. Magic.

We got off at Ealing Broadway and attempted to find somewhere to eat. Our first port of call was a fast food shop on the way as we had the idea of getting a pizza between us. This shop had pizzas advertised on the outside and up on the main menu too but when we asked for one we got told that they don’t do pizzas any more. Talk about wasting someone else’s time rather than your own. Upon finding little else we settled on a Subway and then headed on to the park to find Kirsty.

Upon finding Kirsty we headed into the bit of the park that had been sectioned off for the event to find what was essentially a huge circus tent, a bar, some picnic tables and portaloos. We nabbed one of the picnic tables before it started to fill up and over the course of the hour before we went in we had a good natter, exchanged presents (a piano badge and Tim Tams from Kirsty for me), drank and braved the portaloos, which smelt absolutely horrible. Even the ones I braved at Latitude towards the end of the next weekend didn’t smell as bad as these ones. Yuck.

From here on in this blog will be annotated slightly with photos which I have took as I like showing them off. Click on them to see them bigger and stuff.

So we went in to the huge tent eventually and found our awesome seats in the front block to be greeted by this guy:

The lovely Rufus Hound, who was our compère for the evening. Here he is telling his joke about stag parties, which became the running theme of the night:

He introduced the first act, Paul Zenon, who mentioned he’d been on kids’ TV a while ago, which could go some way as to explaining why I felt like I’d seen him before although it could also be his countless Countdown appearances too.

For those not in the know, Paul is a magician, which is fine by me as I love magicians despite all the stereotypes that girls aren’t sposed to. I have plans to see four magic shows at Edinburgh after all.

Clearly when they’d booked him no one had thought that a magician might require some audience participation because, as I failed to mention earlier, the stage was set quite high up, like about five feet, with no way of getting on to it from the front. Talk about good planning. Luckily the first guy was tall himself and the second guy spotted a chair he used to give himself a leg up.

Anyway, Paul’s style of magic is fairly traditional, that’s to say there’s no mind reading (though he did keep asking someone throughout the show if a card was his without asking him to choose one) and no blood and gore that I’d associate with newer magicians either (see Pete Firman for that stuff) but it was still great fun. I really do think that that’s the only way I can describe his act - fun. I enjoyed it a lot because it was just that and provided I’d see a different assortment of tricks I’d happily go and see him again. After all, he did create Crazy Cottage, which I used to love as a child.

Next we had the interval followed by Rufus pointing out the mayor of Ealing in the tent, who possibly gave the best heckle I’ve ever heard, which was to the effect of, “Do you want paying for this or not?”. Smooth. He then went on to introduce our second act, Ed Byrne:

Having last seen him in May when he was so far off form I had my reservations about seeing him that night but luckily for me (and possibly him) he was much better than that night. He was still a way off being as good as he was at Leeds but I can’t help but wonder if it’s because of the new material he’s producing and he’s still trying to get himself accustomed to it. Granted, I didn’t actually hear much new material that night as most of what he said was the stuff he’d done in Armagh but performed slightly better but back when I heard it in Armagh, it was new. It’s certainly a plausible theory in any case. I’ll have to wait til I see him in Edinburgh to verify it. So yes, he was good but not as good as he could have been.

After another interval and some drunken audience banter from Rufus (the audience was drunk, not him) referring back to the stag night joke Tim was finally introduced.

I have a hazy memory as to the exact details but he started with If I Didn’t Have You, which as he pointed out to me later, is much better live than just listening to it. He also played over the course of the night The Phil Daoust Song, Canvas Bags and the première of Confessions, which just had me in stitches. And, for some reason that I forget, possibly just because it was so high, he decided to jump off of the stage and landed rather awkwardly. He put Paul Zenon’s assistants to shame when he just bounced back on to it like some sort of gymnast.

He came back on to do a encore as per usual and Rufus suggested he do a song about stag nights and people called Dave, which lead the audience to shout out punchlines and what have you at the stage. Tim clearly got confused by this as he hadn’t heard Rufus tell the joke so he ran from his piano to the other side of the stage to ask Rufus what the hell they were talking about. Whether this was because he wanted to know or just because it gave him some time to think up some lyrics is unclear at this point but after much to-ing and fro-ing he settled down at his piano and bashed out an improvised song on what Rufus had suggested and “one wanker who always yells lemons”, which was a reference to one of Paul Zenon’s tricks.

So yes, much fun was had that night at the show and we stood outside the tent waiting for Tim afterwards before security decided to shoo us out cos security people can be mean like that. Waiting by the main entrance we had a look round and saw another entrance to the site but decided it was too small to be of any significance. We changed our mind when we heard a familiar Australian accent coming from its location though.

We went to Tim, who was with a couple of other people that Tim had assumed were us (hey, it was dark - how was he to know?) and gave us all hugs, which these other people seemed a bit miffed about. Stuff was talked about like how we’re the stalkers and such like and we gave Tim his first mystery plaque with the message ‘Dirty Safety Hero’ and a hat, which when worn by him would create a visual pun - a tam.

Just as we were about to leave I remembered I had a present to give Tim, I think cos he’d mentioned Chris’s name and I’d got one for him too. Tim said how Chris had been there, standing by the entrance a short while ago and so I gave Tim two sticks of rock, one for him and one for him to give to Chris and then we left. At this point it was fair to say I was saddened as I’ve been e-mailing Chris for a few months and we’d talked about meeting at this gig.

Now what I thought had happened, from the way Tim described it to me, was that he’d been standing there whilst we were talking to Tim, seen us and then decided to go back to the bar without saying, “hi,” but apparently he’d come out with Tim and when these other people who they thought were us turned out not to be us he went to the bar so he’s been forgiven, though maybe I should be forgiving Tim for misleading me and making me feel all sad for the rest of the night. Never mind.

Now, nothing usually happens on the way back from gigs apart from travelling, however, this time we picked ourselves up some stalkers/fans/etc, in the form of those other two people Tim was talking to. They seemed to be impressed at how Tim knew us and stuff and kept asking questions and got us to pose for a photo for them, which they probably deleted when they sobered up and realised they didn’t know who we were.

Now, considering this was nearly two weeks ago I think I’ve done a half decent job of remembering stuff about it so hurray for that and let’s move on to today’s problems.

I had a parcel from Play.com today, which was meant to be Alick’s birthday present from back in June but the release date of it kept getting put back. My plan was to let him open the parcel for himself but something nagged at me to open it myself just to check things. It’s a bloody good job I did as they cocked it right up. They’ve sent me something from the same series, yes, but it’s so far different from what I actually ordered it’s ridiculous. How you can actually mistake what I ordered for something else really is beyond me so I’ve got that to send back tomorrow. It’s at times like these when I’m glad I have a Post Office over the road.

And to finish today’s blog, the other Ealing Comedy photos that I didn’t use to annotate this blog with: