shark_hat | Brilliant night

Robin Ince's Book Club, this time with added Robin Ince- excellent. I never thought I'd see a day when Rob Newman playing the ukelele wasn't the highlight of any given bill. (I think Martin White singing Bohemian Rhapsody and accompanying himself simultaneously on piano and accordian will take some beating for "best thing ever", actually.) "One of our aims is to perplex you", Ince said about one of the poets, and they cartainly managed it, but it was just all really funny in a (sorry about this word) quirky way, and also very... nice. Another bad choice of word, but, well, I was really happy all the way home. Just silly life-affirming stuff. And making fun of bad books. (The graphs in "How To Pick Up Sexy Women"... worth a show to themselves, surely.) Freeform jazz dance performed to Danielle Steele's poems, and a childrens' dance routine without the children, from an Aussie called Trevethyn; several ridiculous characters, all Gnarls Barklay not doing very much, by Johhny Candon (with rebukes by Robin Ince); giant Boggle with Josie Long; a competition to read the worst sex scene (I could have happily lived without the words "passion basket" ever coming to my attention), judged by operatic aria; Pan's Person; a half-naked Abraham Lincoln heckilng (Matt Crosby); Howerd Read's songs; Wuthering Heights with sheep; just... daftness. Knowing that there are people doing this sort of thing totally cheers me up.

It's an awayday at work; staff presentations and inspirational speech this morning, and have snuck away from lunch with many delicious desserts to post this before boat trip this afternoon.