Good Times & Fine Dining Are Where You Find Them.

Wow, feels like I haven’t done a blog in ages. Two weeks is a long time.

Hopefully the video blog was enjoyed, if not ‘endured’, by some of you. If it wasn’t enjoyed by any of you don’t feel a great urge to let me know.

So, the last two weeks? Well I guess they’ve been pretty busy.

I took a holiday from both work and writing. It was just long enough to make me miss both and be ready to get back into the so called ‘real’ world and back onto the grinding treadmill of full time employment.

I guess this may as well be a recap of the last two weeks then. They’ve been busy and quite eventful for a number of reasons.

After retaining my title as ‘King Of Skegness’ then winning the title of ‘Emperor of Skegness’ by getting the number 1 spot on another Star Wars machine in Ingoldmells, I enjoyed late night Fish & Chips followed by a celebratory ice cream on the beach in Ingoldmells. It was around 11pm and pitch black on the unlit beach. It was a calm evening though so I could relax and enjoy the sound of the sea, the taste of the fish, chips & ice cream and the even sweeter taste of total victory.

That was a great weekend and a stupendous moment in my own personal history.

The following day (Sunday) Mum & I went to the local car boot sale where I got the games ‘Jenga’ and ‘Ker-plunk’ plus the movie ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ on DVD all for a pound each.

That’s right; £1 for each of these awesome things! Amazingly the games didn’t have any pieces missing and the movie plays fine.

This epic win~! was closely followed by another one; going to the pub for Sunday lunch .

I’d seen the advertisement for the ‘£3.95 Carvery’ from the car as I’d driven past several times in the last two days.

“£3.95 for a carvery?” I thought. “Can’t be very good for that price.” I concluded.

I was wrong. VERY wrong.

It was fookin awesome. One of the best I’ve ever had, in fact!

Add to that the fact the pub had their TV’s on a channel playing only 80’s music and I was a happy (and very full) boy/man/person by the end of my jam roly poly and custard!

Musical highlights while eating were ‘Wishing’ by A Flock Of Seagulls, ‘Take On Me’ by A-ha and, as if to bid us a fond farewell as we left the pub ‘Prince Charming’ by Adam & The Ants.

Any subsequent Sunday dinner would have to go some to top this one.

Actually, come to think of it Jen’s Mum easily equalled it the following week!

It was quite funny while we were eating that a family came in and sat at the table next to us with a little girl no older than 7 or 8. All she wanted to do was play with the brand new doll she’d got in a carrier bag (perhaps from the same car boot sale, who knows…?). She couldn’t have been less interested in eating a big plate full of dinner, but that’s what her (rough looking) parents and grandparents forced her to do.

I mean, how dare a child actually want to play with her new toy instead of piling a plate 10cm high with carvery dinner. Seriously, I was a combination of amazed and disgusted at how much food the dad/grandad of this lot got on his plate.

Amusingly the little girl ate only the meat and left the rest of her dinner in favour of playing with her new doll (the parents eventually relented & let her excitedly tear it from the box).

As we left the pub we walked round the corner to visit one of Mum’s friends and saw this same family looking at some of the caravans for sale on the front of the park.

I heard (very UNamusingly) someone, who I assumed to be the mother of this little girl, say to anyone within earshot that the caravan she was looking through the window of was “fucking beautiful”.

I get very uncomfortable with grown ups swearing in front of kids. The sad thing was that this little girl didn’t even react to her mum saying this right in front of her.

That, combined with giving her a telling off and making her cry for wanting to play with her new doll in the pub, made me wonder about the parenting skills of the people she calls mum & grandad.

After the ‘Sunday Dinner Food Coma~!’ had been overcome and mum’s friend had been visited I drove home in the afternoon to meet up with Stu & go to the Just The Tonic comedy night for Richard Herring. Despite witnessing some quite spectacularly fuckwitted excuses for driving on the way home I arrived back safe and the gig was excellent, as Herring always is.

His latest set is called ‘The Headmaster’s Son’ (he was literally this himself). This being the third time I’ve seen him live I thought it would be more of the same style but with new material. I was wrong.

I’ve never seen him own a room so well as he did that night. From the opening line he was just on fire. He held the audience’s attention so well and was so funny he actually had to heckle himself as nobody could find fault with his act.

The pinnacle of the night came, fittingly, at the conclusion of the set where, after discussing what his life as a schoolchild may have been like were he not ‘The Headmaster’s Son’, he performed a great Gollum-esque duelling conversation between today’s 41 year old version of Richard Herring and that of the 13 year old version.

A lot of comedians try to leave on a huge crescendo of laughter after building the set toward the final 5 minutes. Herring did all the building throughout a fantastic set but when the end came, after the duelling monologue between the two ages of himself he looked back on his life and, rather touchingly, ended the set with some reflection on how it probably didn’t make that much difference after all that his dad was also his headmaster and that the 41 year old version of himself had achieved all the things his teen self had desired, despite the teenager accusing the early 40’s version of being a sell out. Highest recommendation to see.

Visit www.richardherring.com for tour dates and more info.

So, after a quite stunning Herring evening it was back to work for 3 days and then off again until yesterday!

This weekend was awesome for all the reasons above and many more. I think the enjoyment of doing the video blog, turning the high score thing into a quest (that I maybe take far too seriously) and the great weather all combined to make a short but highly enjoyable mini-break in one of the best seaside resorts in the country.

Good times, like fine carvery dining, don’t come from spending the most money or going to the most exotic location, they’re wherever you find them.

 

Part two of the recap (including an all new installment of the ’fence dispute’), tomorrow…