Penguin Art

I was going to be in Wales today and now I'm not. Its definitely a bonus in some ways, especially as I am about to go to my friend Louis' house for free soup. He's making it, its not free in some cup-a-soup deal. Or at least I hope not. I get excited about soup. Its lazy man food. I always feel they should advertise it with the slogan 'Are you too lazy to chew your food? Try...SOUP!' I should be an ad man. 

Last night I did a nice little gig in Wivenhoe. Wivenhoe is one of those places that you don't really expect anything from as it really has nothing in it. The gig was in a pub on 'the High Street'. I have certain expectations of a high street. These include various retailers, restaurants and kids hanging around to start trouble. This high street just had the pub on it. Its fair to say Wivenhoe is a modest little town. Despite the size of area, the audience was full and the people were lovely. One in particular was a man called Ian whose profession was as a vet. He had a truly ace animal related story. It might not make you laugh out loud, but hopefully you will be bowled over with its whimsy. 

I asked Ian what the most exotic animal he'd ever worked on was, and it happened to be a penguin who had swallowed a pencil. I remarked about how perhaps said penguin was trying to continue the publishing antics of his relatives. I give myself a small tick for that. Apparently though this poor penguin was bombarded by kids on a school trip and force fed a pencil. I'm not sure whether the kid was a genius and experimenting or an arsehole vandal trying to graffitti the inside of a penguin. 

This was apparently quite an easy job to fix apart from the fact that once the penguin joined his friends they couldn't work which one was which and had to x-ray the whole lot (which I really hope they did by making them waddle one-by-one through an x-ray machine). They never ending up finding the pencil and several days later a penguin just shat it out. I hope there was another school trip on that day so that children could witness the passing of stationary and forever think thats where pencils came from. We can but hope. 

All in all it was a nice evening with lovely turns from Tony Cowards, Gary Delany and Aaron Counter who I gave a lift home too and he brought cookies. That for me helps him rank among my list of good car passengers. Its a simple system to become a good car passenger. Just bring sweets. It might destroy my diabetes, but it warms my car driving heart. 

Time for soup!