Spamalot

Well it’s actually been a lovely weekend; a couple of very late nights, but definitely worth it.

Saturday was pretty lazy – I spent most of the day sorting out how my email accounts are organised. (My domain name has been used by someone for generating spam email addresses so I’m getting dozens of non-delivery reports and out-of-office replies each day which are irritating and take up time and space.)

Once that was done, we were into town with Rosie to meet up with Rich (Brett’s former roommate from Austin) and his partner John. We started out with dinner at The Chinese Experience on Shaftesbury Avenue which provided a nice intimate booth for us to chat away. The food was very good Chinese fare and the service friendly and fast.

Then we were on to the Palace Theatre to see Spamalot, the musical written by one of the Monty Python team (and drawing heavily on the Python canon and style.) I had heard the soundtrack a few times and failed to be terribly impressed, but the stage show was quite a revelation and had me laughing out loud on many occasions; not quite your regular musical theatre experience, there were some of the better aspects of British pantomime in the mix as well as the zany humour of the Pythons.

After the show, which we all enjoyed, we did our usual ‘showing guests around London’ trick of wandering from one place to another in search of somewhere to have a quick drink and finding none of the places quite adequate for our needs and then ending back pretty much where we started an hour later. Rich was looking pretty worn-out by the time he settled into one of the deep sofas at Kettners for a few beers before parting.

Unfortunately we had left it rather late and by the time we left the comfort of Soho we had missed the last train and were reduced to the nightbus. Fortunately we found a seat fairly early in the journey. I spent most of the trip listening-in on the conversation of four students who were sitting next to us; two locals from London and two down for the weekend from Leeds. The two pairs of friends hadn’t met prior to this journey but they instantly fell into friendly conversation about all things studenty and/or Londony and chatted all the way through the forty-minute journey to Wimbledon (and presumably on to Kingston were they were heading!)

I don’t think that, even as a I student, I was ever that gregarious and I spent a while wondering at what formative experiences they had had that I had perhaps missed, or vice versa. Inevitably, at that time of night and with my slightly alcohol-befuddled brain, I couldn’t reach much of a conclusion and ended up merely mourning the lack of something I never had to begin with.