Barrels

Occasionally I am asked just what its like living with two other comedians and whether or not its a constant barrel of laughs. Barrels of laughs are second only in the line of best barrels ever, after barrel of monkeys. Double barreled shotguns are somewhere near the bottom unless the barrel in said gun is one of laughs or monkeys and then shooting someone with it will no doubt be a bundle of joyous capuchin or giggle based antics. Same applies for when rolling out said barrel. So anyway, regardless of quality of barrel (third in line by the way is any barrel containing booze of any sort), I usually reply by saying that its not and just nice and we all just get along in the same way any other flatmates would. I then point out that we probably have more conversations than most about just how it is that when Craine has a shave he covers all the walls in foam to an extent that I constantly expect to find a group of confused Ibiza holiday goers having a rave in there.

The truth is of course, that it is actually a shedload of fun. Again this is the best sort of shed based contents. Some people fill their sheds with gardening tools and all manner of unwanted household goods. If you ever pop your head inside a shed to find it is filled to the rims with fun, you'll be a happy gardener indeed. As an example of just how much fun it is, we have just returned from our almost weekly Sunday breakfast/lunch/brunch outing. This has become a regular occurrence if we are all in the flat. Tom will declare that we should go get food somewhere, myself and Nat will agree. Then we will sit around till about 1-2pm, waiting to the point of absolute starvation until we shout at Tom as to why he's still not ready then spend 20 minutes trying to help him find his shoes and eventually head towards a food serving based premises before remembering that Nat has left some candles burning in the bathroom and weighing up the possibility of whether or not they'll set the house on fire if we don't go back and put them out. Today we decided they wouldn't. I can't imagine our science of the high possibilities of tealights falling directly into the sink or the toilet and avoiding the bathmat would gain any insurance companies approval. We have several favourite haunts, and by that I mean places to eat, not venues where we dress up as ghosts and scare people, though its only a matter of time before someone thinks this is a good idea. Each possible venue depends on amount of effort required to get there and so more and more frequently we end up in Rex's Cafe in Muswell Hill.

There are a number of reasons why we like this place so much. One is that the staff are so lovely that they don't seem to mind the amount of questions Tom poses to them about what they would recommended and what exactly all the food comes with before he decides he won't get that dish anyway and starts all the questions again from the beginning. Two, they don't question Nat having red wine with her breakfast. If anything, they seem to encourage it. Three, there is one waitress who is extremely cute, thinks me and Tom have the best tshirts ever and has now been labelled by Tom and Nat as 'my wife'. Today Tom tried to get me to woo her by starting conversations with me when she was near that sounded as though they might be exciting. One particularly ill thought out preposition began 'So I can't believe you actually caught that hawk!' To her credit, she still spoke to us afterwards. I might actually marry her. This all ties into reason number four, which is that they put up with our inane batshit banter that seems to rise above the rest of the restaurant noise causes tables nearby to either chuckle along (preferable) or really not enjoy their food as bowl based discussion occurs (not preferable).

Today's banter involved Nat telling a story about conditioner that made myself and Tom pretend to sleep out of sheer boredom, Tom's dismay at finishing a milkshake too quick and the waitress (not my wife)'s note that only men order strawberry milkshakes, the fact that Tom looks like a slow loris - see:



(Tom is on the left. Uncanny huh?)

- a 15 minute punning session about using tennis parlance in a restaurant ie 'is service included?' 'could I have a deuce please?' etc etc; then a large amount of insulting revolving around whatever we could to up the stakes on meanness including Tom telling me I had diabetes and then explaining that he'd blocked my twitter feed, which I explained was for the best incase he learnt what a real joke looked like and various moments where it was explained that Nat's new haircut makes her look like a 'moody bean'. Much much fun. For us. For the rest of Rex's Cafe, I can't help but feel they were wondering who the dicks in the corner were, though it might explain why once again, we were placed in the corner rather than in the centre. My poor wife.

So, to cut a long story a paragraph or two less, yes, it is a barrel of monkey laughs. I very much like our flat and I will like it even more when we can remove those weird Ibiza clubbers from dancing around the sink.