First, let me set the scene. I’ve just come out the bath and done half a bottle of a very nice ‘Liz Richardson’ Sauvignon Blanc. I’m now sat down with the rest of the bottle, my netbook and the Bahrain GP qualifier.
Sarah I’ve just added the second lot of finings to the Pinot, so I reckon it will clear by about mid-week and I can bottle about Thursday, I reckon it’ll yield about twenty eight bottles.
Okay so this morning started far earlier than I would have liked, this was mainly due to me having an early night last night (I was in bed at midnight). So I woke up like a shot at 4AM and couldn’t get back to sleep again. Jamie was eating up most of the bed, not because he was on my side, but because he’s quite large.
SO had breakfast and coffee, thankfully this fired up my bowels, which was useful as I had a lot of travelling and sitting to do today and I’d had a rather fiery pizza last night.
Jamie was demanding him I bang him harder than the start of the universe. Unfortunately I had to go to Tesco’s, so sex was out. He then apparently fapped so hard there was a bit of a ‘Something about Mary’ incident. I came back from shopping, he had washed his hair but was still out with the dog. I unloaded the shopping, made myself look like a chav and then he turned up. Dog didn’t have a shit, she’ll regret that.
We got to Parkway station in time, the battle with the ticket machine was fairly painless. Train was on time. Journey was uneventful, except for a moment in Swindon where we were delayed for a couple of minutes due to ‘a gentleman who refused to get off the train’. The gentleman was a chav from Bristol, there was no shortage of people who help to remove the ‘gentleman’ from the train. On to the underground and we arrived at the theatre in good time.
This was the Dominion theatre right on Piccadilly Circus. We were here to see Queen’s and Ben Eltons ‘We Will Rock You’. Incidentally this trip was a present from Jamie for my birthday, although delayed by a couple of weeks.
No I had no expectations of this show whatsoever. I hadn’t looked anything up, read any of the reviews or anything. I had a vague recollection of the story after seeing something perhaps on some chat show years ago. After wall this production was in it’s eleventh year. We had perfectly nice seats at the front of the upper circle. Good view of the bulk of stage, probably missing a couple of feet at the front right. House wasn’t packed, this was a matinee performance, I’d say upstairs was only about 50% full, I can’t comment on downstairs. Now regarding the show itself, I was pleasantly surprised. As I said I had no pre-conceptions. I know it was written by Ben Elton, but he had written a musical with ALW years ago about football that lasted 5 minutes, but I wasn’t really expecting the humour that was in this production. I didn’t recognise any of the actors, but apparently the chap who played ‘Pop’ was ‘Curly Watts’ in Coronation Street. I’m not going to tell you the story, go see it for yourself, it’s well worth it. Yes there were some very tenuous links into some of the Queen songs, you could really feel Elton squirm thinking ‘shit I need to incorporate this in here somehow’. But I know the show has been updated on a regular basis to keep it contemporary, but Elton did a bloody good job of predicting the future as regards social media and about how everybody will just live ‘on-line’. There are some fantastic references, ‘GlobalSoft’ and the ‘iPlanet’. I must admit act two seemed somewhat rushed and you did get the feeling that Elton wanted to put on his shiny suit and get on stage and do some ‘Thatch gags’ rather than write an ending which was a complete rip of ‘Sword in the Stone’. There were some great gags, some great Queen songs of course, all sung beautifully from a great cast. ‘Pop’ incidentally stole the show on a number of occasions, mainly with the gag, ‘I’m a groupy, shall I show you my tits?’. Also it wasn’t the case of which of the ensemble cast I’d shag, more of in which order. At the end of it, on one of the many large screens came up with, ‘So do you want Bohemian Rhapsody then?’, ‘Oh alright’. And they pulled off a good version, the band, give them credit also did a great job. It must be very very difficult to pull this off eight shows a week for eleven years and still keep it fresh and put in huge amounts of enthusiasm. I do something new almost everyday of the week, yet I hardly get excited at all. But that’s mainly because I’m a bitter and twisted old queen.
We left the Dominion and headed to Imano, which is described as a ‘Oriental Interactive fusion restaurant’. With a title like that it had a hell of a lot to live up to. We had booked a table, so there was no faffing about. The toilets were stunning, I could have gone for a swim in the sink. When seated, as I was an ‘Imano’ virgin I was taught by a Polish lady how to use the mouse. Well actually it’s all a bit strange, let me describe…you are sat at a table, above it, there is a projector, this projects images directly on your table. You have a little circular touch pad. So you can select the menu directly on your table, as if you were using a normal touch screen type thing. Indeed on a number of occasions I forgot about the touch pad and tried to use the table as a touch screen, this failed. I managed to order water, which arrived pretty promptly. We then started with squid dim-sum, this was nice, but did set a precedent for the rest of the meal, it’s temperature, it was tepid. I then ordered the cod and some rice. The cod apparently was their most popular dish. Jamie ordered some Sushi, I had a bit, it tasted like a used tampon, I’m not a Sushi fan. He also ordered some ‘mini-ribs’, there was more meat on Victoria Beckham. My cod arrived, I must admit it was beautifully cooked, but I just wish they had heated it up a bit, it was ‘vaguely warm’, in the same way that ‘Cold Play’ are vaguely tolerable. It was also bloody pricey. What was basically a frozen Tesco cod fillet served on a piece of turf was 17 quid. Now Jamie had the duck. This was stunning. Okay it was also tepid. But there was way more fat on Jamie. It was lean, beautifully cooked (and then obviously left for ten minutes to cool down), the only ood thing was the crispy pancakes, normally it’s crispy duck, this time it was the pancakes that were crispy, very odd. Anyway, we finished off, the rice incidentally you could have welded bricks together with, yes it was ‘sticky rice’, but it stuck like shit to a blanket. We ordered desert, are time was beginning to run out as you are only allocated 90 minutes. Obviously after that time the food goes from ‘Tepid’ to ‘fucking frozen’. I ordered the selection of sorbets, Jamie went for the selection of ice-creams. When it arrived it was identical, the only difference was the time it spent in the microwave, the sorbet was slightly more icy than the ice-cream. We settled the bill, which was just short of eighty quid. It really was style over substance.
We then had a bit of a run back to Paddington station. The train left at 19:45 and it was 19:28. We missed the first tube by seconds. It was now 19:33 and we had six stops to do. We got to Paddington at 19:42, we had to do a bit of a ‘Rocky’ running up eight flights of stairs. We got the train.
The journey back was again uneventful. I do love the London train back to Parkway as it goes on to Swansea. This means it’s usually full of pissed Welshmen, this train was no exception. There were a number of rather excited Welsh women in our carriage. The highlight being one women shreaking, ‘Oh yes, not only irons his pyjamas but his underpants as well’.
We got home. I let the dog out. She was happy. I got into bed. The dog was going ape-shit, Jamie went for a pooh. I then realised why the dog was going ape-shit, she hadn’t been fed, that was rectified. The dog then crawled under the bed. I then re-created the conception of the universe, this time however it was the pillow that suffered the fall-out. I got in the bath.
And there we have it. I’ve finished off the second glass, and we are all up to date. And Nico Rosberg is on poll.
