It feels a bit decadent to have taken the entire weekend off with just two and a bit weeks to go until Edinburgh, but it's actually been a brilliant idea to forget about the show for a couple of days and have some fun. Hopefully I will return to the comedy coal face tomorrow refreshed and raring to go, but maybe I will have forgotten the entire show. I don't care if I have. It was worth it and I still have 17 days to write a new show!
We headed to Covent Garden this morning to visit the Marathon shop and buy some running shoes for the forthcoming
Royal Parks Half Marathon (you can still sign up to run yourself - why not do it for SCOPE like me - of if that's too much to ask you can
sponsor me here. A man filmed me running on a treadmill, ostensibly to work out if I needed running shoes with extra support, though I think he probably actually runs some specialist porn website for perverts who are aroused by fat men lightly jogging. And if I am wrong then let the London Marathon shop sue me.....
London seemed to be getting all the year's weather in one day. We had clearly missed a deluge whilst we unwittingly performed for jogging- aroused perverts as the road outside was now flooded. We went to Pret a Manger for lunch (because I am classy) and sat by the window. The canopies outside had clearly also filled with rainwater as a gust of wind sent a trough load of cold water cascading into the street, missing an oblivious man by inches. That'd ruin your day. You'd be watching out for puddles and making sure that cars didn't drive past and drench you and then your fate hits you unexpectedly from above. It's a perfect sit-com scenario. I'll sell it to Miranda.
We headed up to Oxford Street and I don't know if the economy is as fucked as people say because it was like Christmas week up there. Maybe there's just thousands of window shoppers, dreaming of what they might buy if only there wasn't a recession, but I doubt it. My girlfriend looked at clothes and like a typical boyfriend I let her get on with that whilst I stood with our bags. I idly tweeted some of my thoughts about Harry Potter, being careful not to reveal any actual plot details, but remarking that it seemed unnecessary to have the final scene 19 years in the future and the weirdness of seeing 19 year olds having 13 year old children. A surprising amount of people tweeted to inform me that the characters were actually 36 at that point - I am constantly amazed at how often a jokey tweet is taken seriously by people who are presumably following me because they know I am a comedian. But worse others were angrily tweeting calling me a tosser for giving spoilers. Though I wasn't sure what they thought I had revealed. Really only that time didn't end in the film and remained linear. And maybe that the film came to an end rather than continuing forever as a fly on the wall documentary. Some people just want to get angry about stuff, I think. So I posted a few more tweets giving spoilers of stuff that doesn't actually happen in the film, like "I liked the final scene of JK Rowling rolling around in money, shouting, "if you're over 12 and care about this you are a fucking idiot!" People joined in. And this idle time-killing ended up with @Herring1967 trending in the UK. Which shows just how magic Potter is. People are very passionate about this franchise one way or the other. I am actually fairly ambivalent. I was just trying to be amusing! Story of my life.
With all the stuff going on in the news at the moment, it's tweets about a fictional boy wizard that get people's juices flowing. Which is probably why nothing will ever change. Who cares about the rotten core of our society being exposed when someone has revealed half a detail about a film based on a book that has been out for four years? Not me, obviously.
