Rocketman*

Last week we had English Comedy night at Lulu's.

Nothing special about that you might think, well, you might think that if you're new here & haven't read my bio first...

English comedy in a little German town, especially a German town that doesn't have a huge expat community like D'dorf or Cologne have, although the number of 'foreigners' here seems to be growing on a weekly basis - met a new Yank last week (at the comedy night) and a new Brit the week before, slowly but surely we are infiltrating the local society.

So this was the 2nd such comedy night (the last was in the summer) and we (Rebecca, Rachel (new Brit to Kettwig) & I) were happily ensconced with large (is there any other size?) glasses of wine in the corner of the bar waiting for the 8.30 kick off.

The first comedian was a Yank, Casey James, who has a totally awesome day job, he works for the European Space Agency, he's ex NASA apparently and works with recruiting and training astronauts. Simon doesn't believe he's a rocket scientist, Simon is a sceptic and was heard muttering under his breath "well he is a comedian". I chose to believe that Mr James is ex NASA, if only for the fun I got the following day in telling my so hard to impress it's almost impossible, 13 year old, that I'd met a guy who was a rocket scientist.

The second comedian was actually a comedienne, from Belgium...now I hate Belgium, for the simple reason that everytime we drive to England we spend a large portion of the journey in Belgium, and in my experience the autobahn there are the worst in Europe, it's like the civil engineers made the road surface out of corrugated cardboard, and then to add insult to injury you have to put up with the Belgian drivers. Living here in Germany I'm fairly used to driving on the autobahn where some parts have no speed restriction (Jeremy Clarkson, eat your heart out) and on those stretches you get Porsches and the like shooting up behind you from literally nowhere, but it's OK, you know to expect it and so you check your mirrors and move out of their way, fine, no problem. Belgium doesn't have unrestricted autobahn but you still get idiots who shoot up behind you, pretty much into the boot of your car and expect you to pull over immediately, even if there's no space in the inside lane...when you don't respond to their threat and crash your car into the Stobart wagon alongside they pull back and then race up to you again - fun. Anyway the most memorable thing about the comedienne (from Belgium) was that her day job is doing voice overs in different languages for porn films...

The third and final comedian James Allan, was British ex army originally from Manchester, who now reckons he makes a living in Germany teaching the English language to Germans - I heckled him at this point, couldn't resist the opportunity to point out the irony of the fact that he's a Manc, teaching people how to speak proper English...

It was a great evening, marred only by my mobile - I'd left the children home alone, as the eldest is capable of earning good money babysitting other people's kids and therefore has to do the odd freebie for me, all well and good until the babysitter goes to bed...which he had done (it was mid week afterall) and then the stupid dog got confused (not the sharpest knife in the drawer is our Logan, although if there was a crumb of food in said drawer he'd find it) everyone had gone to bed but he hadn't been out for his snack & a wee**. So the stupid beast had woken Jas by barking (Ben slept on, oblivious) and Jas upset and confused rang me. In retrospect it was probably a good job I was called away from Lulu's, the 3 (large) glasses of wine I consumed seemed like such a good idea at the time, but the following morning I had to suffer through 90 minutes of tortuous pilates and then a further equally painful 90 minutes of German - I think it's fair to say that it was not one of my better lessons, there were moments when I couldn't even remember the English words for what I wanted to say, let alone the German.

* a great Elton John track that you can listen to here
** a routine that I have with Logan, in an attempt to stop him waking me in the night because he needs a wee, I encourage him to go out before going to bed, by throwing a doggie biscuit outside for him to find, a creature more motivated by his stomach you'd be hard pushed to find.