Regular readers may recall me mentioning my pretentiously named friend Ivanhoe. He played the horse, David Collins in TMWRNJ and is also one of those Kiwi style rugby players in the BBC ident. But he is most famous for being the star of a recent London Underground poster in which he was pictured holding a gigantic inflatable crocodile. I believe it was aimed at stopping people carrying giant inflatable crocodiles on the tube, and the campaign has been an unparalleled success. Since it came out there hasn't been a single giant inflatable crocodile spotted anywhere on the tube. Before you could hardly move on any train carriage for giant inflatable crocodiles, but now, mainly thanks to Ivanhoe's ability to pull a slightly amusing face the deluge has been completely wiped out.
Of course as any of you living in London will know there is still a huge problem with giant inflatable alligators, but this isn't Ivanhoe's fault. He was only called in to deal with the crocodile problem. And I don't think there is an actor alive who could pull a funny enough face to stop people carrying giant inflatable crocodiles AND giant inflatable alligators.
Anyway, I thought I was going out for a drink with Ivanhoe tonight, but when I arrived at his flat I discovered that we were in fact going to some parties. The first party was a school disco, held at the nursery which Ivanhoe's eldest child attends. She is 28 years old. Not really, she's four.
Even though it turned out that it was a party for parents and not the kids as well this was still a slightly surreal place to end up on a Friday night. Especially given that I don't have any children (not that I know of! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Though apparently I recently found out that you have to have sex to have children, so I should be OK). It wasn't the most kick-arse do I'd ever been to. They had a DJ, but no-one was dancing and the staff-room had been transformed into a bar selling almost four different kinds of drinks. Perhaps Ivanhoe was trying to get revenge on me for making him spend weeks of his life having a cross-dressing Emma Kennedy sitting on his back (not during TMWRNJ, me and Emma kidnapped him in 2002 and she used him to satisfy her perverted pantomime horse based sexual fantasies - true).
I felt a bit uncomfortable. What if someone asked me why I was there? A nursery school is not a place for a single, childless 37 year old man to be found hanging around. Even if there are no kids there. Perhaps they thought I was some kind of strange-o who liked to come to poor discos that he had little or no actual connection to and then eat most of the nibbles.
We didn't stay long as Ivanhoe had two more parties for us to go to. What would be next for the unpredictable, outrageously monickered, inflatable crocodile hating sex-slave?
Ivanhoe is never predictable that is for sure and after getting a bit lost we ended up in a luxurious flat in Ladbroke Grove having an incredibly grown-up evening with a load of posh middle-aged people. Ivanhoe's social circle is very wide and it is more fun not to question how or why he knows the people he does.
Alas I was tired and emotional and had to bail out before I found out what the third party was going to be. It's hard to imagine what could possibly come next.
