Comedy

Yesterday was officially: A Bad Day.

It all started to go wrong at the stroke of midnight between Wednesday and Thursday when P and I were cuddled up in The Bed, drifting off to sleep, when the chimes of Big Ben were inerrupted by the incessant wail of the fire alarm. Again. Muttering under our breaths, we got up, pulled our warmest clothes on and joined our neighbours to huddle around like a pack of migrating penguins on the street. After the firemen declared it to be a false alarm, we were finally allowed back to bed.

In the morning, I realised that my much-admired butterfly broach (as appreciated by Fern Britton) was missing from my coat. After hunting high and low, the only conclusion I could make was that some annoying little tea leaf had pinched it when my coat was hanging in the changing room at the gyms the previous evening. Which was really annoying, as my best friend AB gave it to my for Christmas several years ago. Grr.

Just as I was about to step out of the door, already late for work, P asked me to show him how to do something on his laptop. And to prove a point (ie, that a CD would work in his computer, despite him saying it wouldn't, so I jammed it in anyway), I ended up breaking his computer... and later on finding out that I'm saddled with a £200 bill to fix it.

All in all, it was A Bad Day. So thank God that P is the world's best boyfriend, and when I got home from work, not only did he cook me a lovely supper, but then he told me he'd got us free tickets to go and see stand-up comedian Jason Byrne at the Soho Theatre (and he bought me some chocolate buttons to eat on the bus).

Jason Byrne was very, very funny. P knows him because he recently took his publicity photos - like the one above, of Jason in our (old) bed with a ram. I'm always slightly scared of stand-ups as I dread audience interaction and being picked on, and although Jason really brought the audience in (but it was such an intimate venue that it worked), I have never seen a comedian work so well with such an unusually responsive audience. Within minutes, we were in stitches and stayed that way for an hour. Jason's impression of Prince Charles and Camilla was hilarious, as was his anecdote of his experience at the Royal Variety Performance... where he met Take That. And a personal favourite was Jason recounting how his six-year-old son informed Jason's heavily-pregnant wife that she was carrying the reincarnated spirit of Steve Irwin.

If you get the chance, go and see Jason Byrne. He achieved the impossible with me - made an intolerably moody cow laugh for an hour. The result? I felt a lot better about The Bad Day.