Fri
10-Aug-2007

great british beer festival 2007

Another night at the Great British Beer Festival ... a big gang of us were there this time. Had a nice time in the Welsh area, before sampling one of my old favourites, the somewhat tart Drie Fonteinen Oude Kriek, and moving on to a cider. I reckon rating 5 is right for the cider - medium dry, but it still has a good sweet fruity edge.

comedy at the thistle hotel

Random great drunken night yesterday. Matt and I met up with Sneh for a film at Leicester Square. We didn't like the look of anything on though, so we went for a drink at a pancake cafe place on the square, then decided to pay £5 and go to one of those comedy gigs they advertise around that area every evening.

So we did, and found ourselves in the Thistle Hotel nearby, with a load of random tourists from all over the place. We too felt like tourists, delving into a different side of London with this collection of middle aged holiday makers, backpackers and very young people.

It was really fun. Our comedian was Inkey Jones, who had an expectant wide eyed delightful face, and his style was to work with any material he could get out of the audience. He found out where everyone was from and made predictable but quick witted jokes around national sterotypes, he homed in on funny voices and big beards, and he totally laid into us as the gay couple, fixing particularly on Matt, who invited it, showed he could take it, and kept throwing him lines. He was more cautious with me, perhaps because in one of his opening lines he accused me of being from "another planet" and I looked at him so blankly that he probably thought I was. But once we had all warmed up, he was calling me a fudge packer like an old friend.

We ended up in the bar, drinking excessively in the way that having Sneh there guarantees, along with Inkey Jones and a random youthful wildlife photography student called Andrew. We didn't leave till after 2am and then fell asleep on the nightbus, with the driver waking us up at Archway, where we slunk home in shame, burping up the McDonalds we should never have had earlier...