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I have lots of celebrity friends. Today I popped down to the South Bank to meet up with my old pal Bluey. A lot of people think it's odd that I am pals with a dog who is also a child, but we've got lots in common and it's none of your business what I do. Piss off.
Once I was invited to crazy celebrity parties (until I got drunk at all of them and people stopped asking me) but now it's mainly events for kids that I get the golden tickets for. But that's fine. I was happy to get to go to see Bluey at the Royal Festival Hall. It's one of the best TV shows there is. Phoebe is a bit too cool for school for this kind of thing now, but still came along (because she had no alternative) but Ernie loved it. There was an afterparty with cake and games and a chance to meet Bluey and Ernie threw himself into all of that.
The show was good too - importantly it was short - under an hour and extended by having quite a long bit of bird puppetry at the start and by chucking some big bouncy balls round the auditorium at the end. It's the only kids Christmas show that I haven't fallen asleep in this year. And you can put that on the poster.
I would have quite admired the production had they extended the early scene of birds pecking the ground and flying overhead for much, much longer. It was charming and pretty, but it would have been interesting to see how annoyed the audience got at the delay to seeing the superstars of the show. What if the whole hour was just birds pecking? What a coup de theatre that would be. Bluey never even showed. It would be mayhem.
The show had nice themes about siblinghood and making concessions to annoying younger children which I tried to hammer home to Phoebe, though she was having none of it. It was a bit of a greatest hits, of course, but it sort of had to be, but gratifyingly the dad, Bandit, was mainly trying to get away from the kids so he could be on his mobile though, so wasn't quite the unattainably brilliant dad he usually is on the TV.
We got a goodie bag at the party and Ernie wanted to bring a balloon he'd been playing Keepie Uppy with home too. Catie said there was no way we should bring the balloon, but I decided to be a bit more Bandit and go with the flow and carted it across a windy London. I nearly let go of it on the tube and we had to wait on a cold platform for ages for our delayed train and it nearly blew away a couple of times and then we had to squeeze on to another fullish train (we did get two seats for the four of us in the end), but somehow the big balloon remained unpopped and didn't get sucked off into the void. I put it in the boot of the car when we got to the car park and is still didn't burst. I thought it would be pretty funny if I let go of it just as we got to our door, but it made it into the house in one piece. It was a triumph. Obviously we're counting down the seconds before it bursts, but I had done my Bandit duty.
