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Crikey

So some friends and I went to Manchester tonight to see Eddie Izzard at the MEN Arena, and it all went off, surprisingly, without a hitch. Travel went smoothly, everything went according to plan. Which was all a bit surprising.
The gig itself was little short of astonishing. Less the performance itself (whilst I like Izzard's stuff I found him rather reliant on repeating tropes to get a laugh out of an exceedingly compliant audience. I think I actually sneered when he got a huge round of applause for some vague anti-foxhunting joke), more the sheer scale of the thing. I've been to rock concerts on a bigger scale, but to see a comedy performance on this scale was just plain strange, one of my friends nearly had an attack of vertigo, so steep were the sides of the arena.
What was fascinating was to hear the sound of laughter on that scale. The slow build of a laugh in thousand upon thousand of people. It was pretty impressive. I could use words like "awe-inspiring" and "thrilling" but I don't want to sound like a fucking hippy. Suffice it to say it was an odd experience.

Back in NaNoWriMo land there are a scant handful of thousand words left to write (about 4000) and two and a bit days left. The end is in sight, and I plan on drinking champagne.

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