Britannia 2011 - Parte The Firste

Arrival and Punky!

I'm not gonna lie, the TSA scares the shit out of me. Something about the combination of their absolute authority in deciding whether or not I pose a threat to my fellow travelers combined with my paralysing fear of public embarrassment makes the "please take off your shoes" portion of my trip the most harrowing part of the whole experience. Why, then, I decided to wear a fencenet body stocking under my t-shirt and jeans instead of underwear and a bra like a normal person is quite beyond my ability to comprehend. It seemed like a good idea when I left the house. It seemed like an incredibly bad idea when I got in the security line and realized there were only two lines open: one regular line and one irradiating porn producing body scanner line. So I was already on edge when the boarding pass checker with the rapist mustache who I was still thirty people away from caught my eye from across the room and yelled "Honey, you've been distracting me for the last 15 minutes!" All heads swiveled in my direction and I laughed nervously and suggested it was due to my pink hair, which coincidentally was now also the precise color of my face. "That and your amazing smile," he said, and I cringed because it was obvious I was going to get flagged for one of those "enhanced pat downs" of which he was sure to surreptitiously photograph me getting felt up with no undergarments to protect me. That didn't happen, of course - I'm just paranoid. Either that or I've repressed the memory, it's hard to say. At any rate, I got to Heathrow as planned, traded my clothes for a raincoat as planned, met the comic sort of as planned, and went to Luton which was not at all planned, but was necessary if I wanted to see my friend Steve, who chose to time his trip to Spain for exactly the same time as my trip to England. I spent an hour chatting with the group in Steve's pub while drinking out of the comic's Stanley Cup shot glass (it is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up)  and trying to deflect questions about why I refused to remove my coat.

On Tuesdays, the comic and his partner Manly Tony record Punky! Radio over Skype. On my first Tuesday in town, they recorded the 300th episode of Punky! in front of a live "studio" (the comic's lounge) audience. Said audience included myself, my darling Sulu and her husband G, Felix a.k.a Hamboy (formerly of the recorder band The Blow Jobs - Felix claims they broke up due to musical similarities) and a guy called Phil who inexplicably carries around a bazouki in the back of his car.

A bazouki player (not Phil)

This came in very handy as Felix had brought three recorders and a tambourine with him and we performed an impromptu mashup of White Riot and Blitzkrieg Bop. I also got to tell the story of the guy who got his face kicked in at Riotfest and introduce the song I had picked out for the show, "She's Only Fucking 12" by 3CR.

We'd had a lot to drink by the end of the show and so the obvious thing to do was go out for Italian food and drink two more bottles of wine at dinner, then head over to the Arena Tavern for some further beers. While the rest of us were comparing our various mobile devices and the games contained therein, the comic wandered off and found a man he'd met recently but whose name he couldn't recall and brought him over to our table in the hopes that he'd introduce himself to the rest of us so the comic could pretend like he'd known his name all along. This plan went awry (as his plans often do) when, upon encountering Sulu and I sitting in close proximity, the stranger abandoned all social niceties and ignoring everyone else greeted us with the question "Are you two lesbians?" I told him we were, but only on Tuesdays.

Having said our goodbyes to the others, the comic, Tony and I went back to the flat, at which time a sane group of people would have gone to bed. Instead, Tony decided to edit Punky! so we could upload it that very night and we all consumed the last of the wine, the port, and half of another bottle of port, then drunk dialed Kelly in Los Angeles for reasons I can no longer remember. Eventually Tony went to bed, while the comic and I stayed up listening to Demented Are Go long past the time my desire to go to bed had kicked in because the comic wanted to hear "PVC Chair" and kept insisting it was the next track, though it never was. We finally got in bed some time after dawn, drunk as fuck and in no shape to get up, pack, and drive to Chester the next day.

The next day we got up, packed and drove to Chester.