Laughs at the Laughing Horse

I was expecting Neil ” I’m free” Humphries’ gig at the Laughing Horse to live up to expectations and be free, but tickets were £5 (nearly 6 euros at today’s excellent Currencies Direct exchange rates) However it was worth it as Neil and his 8 fellow debutants, who had all been on a crash stand up comedy training course, all made us laugh. Some with them, some at them.

It could have been a crash and burn course, and for one poor chap from Luxembourg it was just that, It was still funny, but in a cringing, slow death sort of way, but the renegade from Are You being Served, our own Mr Humphries, excelled with a story about overdoing the fake tan. Now I happen to know that the story was not fabricated and came from his own personal experience, but it was still funny.

The fake tan is beginning to wear off for Mr Humphries

Amongst the luminaries that attended were a handful of chaps who had flown in specially from the south of France, and some who used to live there such as Mr Clipboard. Amusingly for one so anally challenged about being on time, he was late. It appears that someone had not checked the weekend engineering schedules for the railway line he wanted to take, a stunning oversight for a man who loves schedules and organisation almost to the pointing sexual gratification. I enjoyed his discomforture and made a point of tutting and looking at my watch as he arrived, flustered, some 30 minutes late for pre show dinner.  For me that had started my evening off in an entertaining way. His other great love is food, and in substantial quantities, so clearly the thought that dinner may have to be postponed until after the show was almost too much for him to bear, but it turned out all right in the end, although it emerged, as he troughed out in his own peculiar fashion,  that he has only finished lunch at around 4.30. Obviously more than two hours between meals for him is a bit Tom Jones for him. Correct, it’s not unusual.

Earlier, on the train up from Arundel, I had been concentrating on my new writing project, something that I will find easy to write, a weekly column extolling the virtues of living in the south of England as opposed to be marooned in the north of this island. It would be easier still to write about living in the south of France, but I have already written thrillinglyand fulsomely about that, as people who own either or both of my books will testify, so I need a new challenge. The “answer back” column will be written by northern supporter, Peachy Butterfield, who of course has enormous experience of the privations of life in the tundra strewn wasteland that lies north of the Wash. These columns are, rather bizarrely, being written for Onboard Online, a yachting website, but mine is but to do and write, especially as we are getting paid. I shall let you all know when the first of these are published.

As I write this daily treat from my bed at the Thistle Hotel in Marble Arch it is raining, and so, it looks as if my day will improve. That Nice Lady Christmas Shopping Operative had her eye on a morning of festive retail therapy in nearby Oxford Street, but rain, normally a very unwelcome bed fellow, may have come to my rescue on this occasion. In any event, the present I want is not available in a shop, oh no, that needs a garage.

Chris France
@Valbonne_News