Make me smile

Vauxhallville again last night, this time dragging TSB along with me. I say "dragging" but he didn't need much convincing, despite the odd sense of taboo that comes with drinking alcohol in the Vauxhall Tavern on a School Night. Bought a bottle of wine between us this time and, predictably enough, found ourselves buying a second after guzzling the first in record time. Back to the three pints of lager limit next time, I think.

A different crowd from last time, rowdier and, frankly, better looking: a particularly sexy group of bears (what's the collective noun? a woof? a hirsute?) at the back, all attractively gussied up in braces and flat caps. Our own rather pitiful gesture toward the dress code (1863-1945) was to wear vaguely 1940sish jumpers. Garethwyn had obviously had the same idea and, sitting on three stools by the side of the stage, we doubtless resembled some sort of unholy Val Doonican threesome.

Timberlina seemed ripped to the tits, delightfully so. She and Polly Vinyl meandered off into a sick-but-very-funny riff about Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. Volunteers from the audience equally inebriated:



Underbling & Vow provided the bulk of the cabaret, basically a Cockney singalong with comedy character stuff between the songs. I'd seen them before, at Duckie, but here they had time and space to expand their schtick. Almost despite myself, I got drawn into the whole knees-up-Mother-Brown thing - they were impossible to dislike - and found myself heartily singing along. There's something very warm and inclusive about Underbling & Vow's routine.

Not sure if this was a joke but they're apparently planning, when the Olympics come to London, to organise the world's biggest gathering of Londoners simultaneously singing Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner. Sounded like quite a good idea. I was reminded that I now think of myself as a Londoner in a way that I've never really thought of myself as "British" or even as "Scottish". National identity's a strange and complex thing...



Bearlesque finished the night, as seems to be the custom at Vauxhallville. The very lovely Simon Bear did his Singing In The Rain striptease. I'd seen it fairly recently but one can never have too much wet-shirted Simon Bear.