crispfencer | Cris is a tourist in her own country

Rejoice! The Crunch is finally over.

These last few months have been extremely intense in terms of my workload, sleeping patterns and personal life. Some weeks have been worse than others, but otherwise it's just been a general stressy vibe. But hey! it's all over now. To celebrate, I spent a few days in London to unwind...

SUNDAY

Someone saw my Elis and John lockscreen image and went "oooh, I like him! Have you seen Josh?", which prompted a lengthy and gushy conversation about comedians which I was totally into. Sometimes I forget my interests are actually quite mainstream, lol.

Dropped my bags off at my friend's house in Greenwich and meandered on through via Canary Wharf to Islington. My mum always told me that I had "a face just waiting to be mugged" when I visited London, and I think she's right. You could tell I wasn't local from a mile off just from the massive fucking grin on my face, and cries of "these bleedin' buildings ain't half high, eh?", "wow, just like Sherlock..." (I fucking know) and "look at that, there's a proper adult and all on that there scooter!" (Still don't get this trend...) I felt like some sort of TLOG character, if I'm honest.

Ooooooh, tall...

We'd left to see Rhys James in good time, but when my friend double-checked the time on the tickets she realised that the show had actually started half an hour ago. I was surprisingly A Laugh about it (I mean, I wasn't in charge of the tickets anyway) and we made our way to The Pleasance. Once we got there we asked about exchanging our tickets for whatever was on next, which turned out to be Heidi Regan! I'd never heard of her, but she had a shining CV so I wasn't too worried. The show itself was good! Very low-key, with an audience of about 15~ people. If I had to sum it up, I'd say it was "observational comedy from the perspective of an moral time-traveler." Also the room was very hot.

I wanted to sit on the front row, she didn't... so we compromised and sat in the third row. Still very close to the stage!

After a hasty google for fast-food places that were open on a Sunday night, we sat on the floor outside Nandos and ate chips 'n' mash. Great! The walk back home took us past Up the Creek, which made me nerd-out a bit too much. Once we were home we stayed up drinking cider and watching Taskmaster. (Rhod Gilbert series, obvs) Noice!

So cool...

MONDAY

Left the house at 11:00 and found myself with seven hours to kill with basically zero money. Traipsed around the Natural History Museum for about three of those hours which turned out to be rather good fun! The exhibition about the human body seemed to have been left unchanged since the 1980s which is great (I think I spotted the Supermarket Sweep typeface around there too).

That ain't 2019!

Having spent my my money on the train tickets to London and Nando's the previous evening, I couldn't afford to buy any water or food, nor put my 7kg of bags (yes, I weighed them lol) in an over expensive cloakroom. I eventually caved in (literally) and paid to keep my bags in the Science Museum, using up my remaining money. After the brief period of relief, I started to really battle against my hunger- luckily it was all very interesting! I think I saw just about everything in there, my favourite bit being the communications and broadcasting section.

"And Kent was decades behind!" etc etc

(Tbf I would still love one of these.)

I still want to buy this, and it's already in a museum!

Last bit I saw before I left.

When the time came I popped back to the Pleasance (now a very familiar place) to meet with my uncle* and eat our tea. Bliss! He revealed to me that he'd gotten into a bit of a 'virtual scrap' with a famous comedian over something they said at a gig, specifically the sentence "why can't she just talk about Asian issues instead?" Uncle insists they're not racist, just thick. Ten internet points for guessing who we're talking about! (Clue- they've got a tv show...)

Front row for Suzi Ruffell, and can I just say that she was on another level! Definitely in my top three funniest gigs. I won't spoil the show, but there's a bit where I think she's taking a pop at Robins...? Maybe a mixture of him and few other straight white male comics, idk. Anyway, loved that!