Approaching the horse

It's over three months now since I last performed on stage, and I was starting to wonder if I'd ever go up again. This evening I went to Comedy Masala in Singapore, and I felt like I was closer to getting back in the saddle.

It's quite different to what I'm used to. In Hong Kong there was no bar, so people would get drunk then turn up at the show. Thus beforehand the atmosphere was almost sepulchral. In Singapore there's a pounding, pounding music system blasting you for a good twenty minutes before the show starts, which either makes you excited or shellshocked. (What can I say? It *is* too loud and I *am* too old. We can't do anything about the latter, so why don't we try to fix the former?)

Just like the last thing I saw (Alexei Sayle compering at the Soho Theatre) there's a bald man with a beard controlling things. I stood there in the darkness, watching each act and wondering what I'd have said differently, and trying to decide what material from Hong Kong will survive, what will have to be cut, and what was always horseshit.

That's probably enough equine metaphor for one evening.

Today I felt rather blue. I put this down either to being made to copy and paste something in Excel into Powerpoint until my eyes bled, to somebody trying to prove they were a genius by talking at me, or because I didn't leave the office for eleven hours and thus deprived myself of sunlight. Tomorrow I'm going to make certain to go for a walk, and I'm sure that means it will rain continuously from the moment I get to the office until 8pm, at which point the sun will come out, birds will fly backwards and the End of Days will come.

Maybe I'll get some material out of that though.