I’ve just got back from having a rather lovely lunch at the pop-up Innocent Restaurant in Shoreditch. Its not like a popup book sadly, as the rain would’ve made its paper structure rather a mess today, but instead its a temporary venue whereby with a pre-booking you get two courses of a meal, featuring your 5 fruit and veg a day, for a fiver. My brother had the foresight to book this some week’s back and we tottered along today to indulge in some pretty tasty healthy grub. I’m not a prescriber to the 5-a-Day idea. I like to think that some days, should I choose to eat 8 vegetables I can, and the next perhaps only two, surely I’m balancing it all out how I like? I’m not even sure 5 is a scientific fact based number of fruit and veg you should eat, or is it just an imagined figure to give people whose chip based diets can target? I haven’t researched this at all and it could be that after years of study, 5, not 3, is indeed the magic number for staying healthy. I however, shall prescribe to my own method of such things which is called the ‘Don’t Be A Dick’ Diet. This involves me eating what I want, whilst retaining a level of sensibility to know that I can’t just solidly eat ice cream and onion rings. It amazes me that there are people out there who are incapable of working these things out for themselves. People who eat McDonalds everyday and yet can’t figure out why they are unable to walk upstairs without breathing issues. I’m sure its been said time and time again, but whilst the NHS is undergoing some sort of drastic revamp (that’s when they go back to making it as Dracula-esque as it was in the 19th Century due to excessive cuts and greedy GPs hoarding cash to point where we have to use leeches to clean wounds again) I do wonder if we should save the money on all these free stomach staplings and just let these people die out. Evolution arrives in funny ways and perhaps, just perhaps, instead of the next SARS or whatever made up bullshit illness we need to be terrified with, we should just let those incapable of looking after themselves, die out. In years from now, scientists will look back and ponder whether, like the dinosaurs, much of the population of the Western world had been destroyed with a freak meteor attack or drastic climate change, only to excavate and find a series of bodies with undigested Big Macs clogging up their guts, and understanding it all.
This blog wasn’t meant to go mean. Sorry. I’ve had a sugary drink and its affected me. Turns out that while ‘This Water’ is supposedly flavoured water and all natural and that, it contains most of the sugar in the world and is as much water as Lucozade is ‘Sparkling Buxton Aqua’. This combined with the amount of people who, using umbrellas, have tried to express how concerned they are that I have any eyes whatsover and seek to poke them out with a vengeance, has caused minor rage. I am actually, fairly happy. The lunch was nothing less than superb, excellently cooked grub, and the fact it was a fiver made it even better. The fact that my brother paid that fiver is even better than that. I’ve been less pleased with Innocent since they partnered with Coca-Cola, seemingly going against all their original ethics, but I have to say the temporary restaurant idea was good. Its odd events like this that make me truly revel in living in London. So many odd and exciting events happen everyday that I could embark on. I don’t. I rarely ever even think about it. Back in the day where I was excited about seeing my name printed in Time Out for every crappy open spot gig I attended, I would often peruse the other sections outside of Comedy, and look at all the things I wasn’t doing. I would sit there, sigh and think about all the things I’d do if I had more time. The theatre I’d see, the art and museum exhibitions I’d pop into, then I’d drink some tea and go back to bed, without realising just how I was using up all that time in the first place by being a lazy idiot.
But I really should, and its something that recently I’ve thought about a lot more. I know I couldn’t cope living in a town, village or out in the stix, because I need to know all these possible interesting things to do are just around the corner. Sure you’d have fresh air, a community support, no queues for hospitals, lower crime rate and all that, but I would happily discard all that in order to say, ‘Well I heard there was a good exhibition on at the British Museum. Maybe I should go,’ and then not go. Rhodri Rhys pointed out to me at our gig last night, that by doing comedy, he has now been to all the cities in Britain. That is a quite a thing to achieve. How many other jobs allow you to see most of the major areas of your own country? Very few I reckon. I’ve probably done it too. I’m not going to check. I’m just going to tell people I have. They will go through each and every city challenging me with the obscure ones. ‘St David’s with its tiny 2000 population’? Yes, been there. ‘How about Ripon?’ Well no, I haven’t been there. But you know, who has? ‘The 245000 people that live there?’ Who are you? Why are you ruining my day with your city based challenges? So I’ve been to all the cities in the UK too, and spent a good amount of time in most of them, perusing the sights, giving up on the sights in some places and just going to the cinema, sometimes just hiding in my room all day long, and yet, I barely bother to see or do all the things in my home city. Well maybe I’m gonna start. Yeah, that’s right, maybe I’m gonna go see stuff and do things. Not now though. I’m pretty full from my 5-a-Day and now I’ve hit my criteria, I need to work on balancing it out by just eating cheese till tomorrow. Then tomorrow, when that’s done, I’m too busy so I won’t check out stuff then. Maybe Monday. Or the week after. God its tiring thinking about it. I’m going back to bed.
