How laughter is the only medicine.

Oh happy day, oh happy day when Janey slept 8 hours away. What a difference sleep makes. I am getting a routine going of morning exercise (yoga or hill walking) and then writing. My mind and body are thanking me for it. I then spent the afternoon kitting out the wardrobe with winter clobber at the op shop to what amounted to little more than a tenner (wahay) and then getting creative customising it all.

Comedy festival

Tonight I spent the evening with the sister of one of my London friends, Lindy. Lindy’s daughter Alexandra is performing at The Basement as part of the comedy festival. The whole night is dedicated to youth talent and ‘The League of Extraordinary Teens’ as they call themselves. They have comedy programs over here where the promising have 6 months of weekend workshops under masters of the craft. If you thought your teenage relative needed little help to rib the piss out of you a half a year’s tutoring turns them into a wisecracking genius.

It’s easy to spot the stars of tomorrow. The Long Haired Westie (not a dog) had a great observational dry humour that is only going to mature with time. The tall curly haired girl with ‘Bugger’ on her T-Shirt who showed us how to do the ‘awkward’ turtle had the ability to hold the audience and fill the room with her presence. Then came AJ and Izzy (AJ being Alexandra). The difference between these 2 and the other acts is that we felt like we were invited into their world and we went willingly. The others tried to rope us into their way of thinking. To sit in front of AJ and Izzy is to get a view of their quirky, sunny planet. Their humour is like watching 2 friends who once started a conversation on a phone years ago and have ever since been experimenting with how many tangents they could come up with. Once they have a tangent they play around with that new destination, creating fantasies about what is there, before journeying onto something new. Their humour – what I would call imaginative, random travelling – is both addictive and compelling. It’s addictive because it is familiar (for anyone that has had such conversations as a teenager or drunken adult) and compelling because it has been then honed to a sharpness. They got the biggest, and well deserved, cheer of the night.