Travellers tales

Published on Thu 10 Feb 2011

I encountered a 9 man strong dance troupe on the Airtrain on Monday. I know they were a dance troupe because they kept on dancing (how little self awareness/what amount of drugs must it take to show off your routines on a train?). And by the level of conversation they were having. Is there any lower branch of human artistic endeavour than dance? Apart from musical theatre obviously. One of my favourite bits of Stewart Lee's excellent book is the appendix which is a 4 page anti-musicals diatribe.

I've been doing quite a lot of flying lately. It's got to the point where I have a favourite cubicle (is it just me that finds the word stall that they use over there a bit horrible?) in the JFK Terminal 4 toilets. I've also noticed that more suitcases now have red ribbons on them to aid identification than don't. It's like that bit of The Sneetches where they've all got stars on their bellies. My case has a piece of yellow and black warning tape on it because, it turns out, suitcases with wheels aren't really designed to be wheeled around. Nobody else has thouught of that yet.

I've also come up with an idea to improve online airline check-ins. You get to choose your seat, and this time I changed mine from a window seat at the back to an aisle seat near the front. Which would've been fine, had there not been a child sat 2 seats away screaming the entire time, and had his mother not tried to comfort him by bouncing him around and kicking me in the arm with his foot. Anyway, my idea is, the little map of the plane should show you where children are sitting so that you can avoid them. It would've improved my journey no end. You could extend it so that public school meathead accountants who are going to put their seats all the way back and then be incapable of sitting still are clearly marked too. And maybe dancers.

I saw Daniel Kitson (I have real trouble not calling him Dave Kitson) at The Junction last night, and he is a genius. He told a 90 minute shaggy dog story, of which (he said) only the start was true, but who knows where truth finished and story began. The writing was brilliant, the delivery enthusiastic and charming, and I was engrossed and smiling for the entire time. I should go and see more comedy - I've not gone out of my way since I saw Eddie Izzard in 1997 at the Corn Exchange and I didn't feel like I got an amount of laughter out of it equivalent to the ticket price. I seem to be a lot more aware of comedy suddenly, I think because I've started listening to a lot of podcasts.

It occurred to me recently that someone should do a mash up of James Taylor's easy-listening-for-the-hard-of-thinking classic "Fire and Rain" with "When I See an Elephant Fly" from the Disney motion picture Dumbo. I think it could work.