Having a day off today to recover from the last few hectic days. I should have taken yesterday off, but I forgot to book it. Fool!
I have a few too many late nights and early mornings and need to catch up on my rest.
Thursday night I went to the comedy club and saw Maeve Higgins and Adam Hills doing their Edinburgh Preview shows. I could not really tell what Maeve was like properly because I was eating my dinner at the back and missed quite a bit of it. She did not really seem to get a lot of laughs though.
Adam Hills was really funny and at the end said that he needed to take this audience with him to Edinburgh.
I had a fairly late night and had to get up early the next morning for work.
On Friday night I went to the Abbeyfest at Merton Abbey Mills to see the second half of the free jazz on the bandstand and the two comedy acts.
The jazz act was called Liane Carroll and is an acclaimed jazz performer. She was very good, but not all of the music was to my taste (I am not the biggest jazz fan).
The comedy was supposed to be Pete Firman and Craig Campbell; both doing their Edinburgh previews. Craig Campbell pulled out late in the day though and was replaced by another comedian whose name I cannot recall for the life of me (even though I have seen him once before).
Pete Firman (a magician who appeared in Monkey Magic on Channel 4) was very good. Probably the most impressive trick was when he got a female volunteer from the audience and drew a crude stick figure picture of her on a small whiteboard and got her to draw a picture of him on another whiteboard. He gave her a big padded envelope to put her picture in and put his in another envelope. He then got her to pull her picture partially out whilst he pulled his partially out, just to show that the right pictures were in the envelopes. Then they slid the pictures back in, he said some magic words, they pulled the pictures out and the pictures had swapped places. Very clever.
The other guy (whose name I cannot recall) did clever musical stuff with a guitar, some effects pedals, and a recording device that allowed him to overlay his playing in real time and accompany himself. Oh, and he did some comedy as well :-)
This did not finish until almost half past midnight and I had to get up fairly early on Saturday.
On Saturday I went to a friends birthday party in the afternoon and was there until about quarter to nine in the evening when we all flocked to the pub to see a band called Fire & Water. This excellent band does Free and Bad Company songs in the first set and Led Zeppelin in the second set. They are all first rate performers and well worth seeing if you like that sort of music.
When the pub closed the party restarted where it had left off and I did not depart my friends house until about half two in the morning.
I then had to get up at about 8:30 Sunday morning so that I could make my way to another friends house (who had also been at the party) so that we could travel to Guildford for the Guilfest.
My friend had a rather monumental hangover and was feeling (and looking) pretty rough until we had brunch in Guildford. It was here we met up with the rest of our group and walked to the festival.
The festival itself was good with a lot of excellent bands. The headliners for the day were Madness who treated everyone to all of their best known hits. We left the main stage a little early so that we could see my friends cousin who was headlining one of the smaller tents with his band.
All in all I had a great weekend, but I was knackered on Monday and really regretted not thinking to book the day off.
