Russell Howard: Big Rooms & Belly Laughs (18 December 2009 – AECC, Aberdeen) Monday, 21st December 2009

To avoid post-show blues I’d deliberately not let myself get too excited about this show, we booked the tickets and then forgot to write it on the calendar. Bad idea. The Monday before the show (it was on a Friday) I asked Mum if we had the tickets yet and she said “Should we?”. After a lot of email searching we finally found a confirmation, rang the number and were told they’d only been posted on Friday. They shouldn’t do that to people. Anyway, thankfully the tickets arrived and we managed to get there.

Unusually, this was the only Scottish show of the tour so there were a lot of non-locals there, mainly Glaswegians. Although, before the show had started I did see at least 10 people I knew from my seat and I’m guessing there were a fair few more. It was nice being able to catch up with people though (there were quite a few I haven’t seen for a while) since the doors opened at 6.30, we arrived at 6.45 and the support act didn’t come on ‘til nearly 8.00! They had music videos and a couple of short films on the screens at the sides though so it wasn’t too boring.

The support act was Steve Hall who was pretty good. I think any comedian who starts a set by asking everyone to shout out their favourite swear word (cunt had an overwhelmingly majority) will always be popular in Aberdeen. To be honest, so many weird things happened at the end of Russell’s set (I’ll get to them later) that I can’t actually remember much of Steve’s set. I did enjoy it though. I was a bit worried about if stand-up would really work in the AECC since it is a massive venue and the only comedy show I’ve ever seen there was the Boosh, and that was more theatre than anything to be honest. And a little bit embarrassing in hindsight…

Russell was brilliant. I’ve only ever seen clips of his stand up and then Mock the Week and Good News but he really is so much better live. He managed a pretty awesome impression of an Aberdonian cab driver (I’ve lived here for 12 and a half years and I can’t do an accent that good) to start with and the set was brilliant. At one point he started telling us a story then realised what the end was and told us that he couldn’t finish it. Thankfully we got it out of him before I went insane (he threw up the first time he went down on a girl if you’re interested). The crowd was pretty good though so apart from a few screams there weren’t many heckles and nothing really went wrong.

The fun really started when he came back on after his set to do a Q&A session though.

There was one guy a couple of rows behind me who was intent on asking Russell for a snowball fight, but he was too far back for Russell to hear. Then someone else near him asked Russell to sign his programme but before he could answer a girl just behind him yelled “Do you want to suck my bum?”. Funnily enough that shocked Russell a bit so she got some attention instead of programme man. Programme man did not like this. The next thing we knew programme man had walked up to the stage and suddenly Russell looked down and said “hello there” and then invited him up.

Off-mic he said to Russell “there’s a lot of ugly cunts down there” which made Russell laugh a lot and then repeated it to us. Then Cuntman (as he became known) asked Russell again if he could sign the programme. Russell said yes, then asked if he had a pen but Cuntman didn’t so they both just stood there and laughed while Steve ran on with a pen, waved, and ran off again. They stood and chatted for a bit and Russ made a comment about Cuntman having tourettes, at which point he unzipped his shell suit (not kidding) and showed us all a t-shirt saying “I don’t have tourettes, I’m just a cunt” (hence the name).

Unfortunately after Cuntman left the stage half the audience decided they wanted to go up too but none of them were very interesting. One girl did go up just to flatten down a bit of hair that was sticking up and annoying her. I liked that, it was annoying me too.

My money’s staying under my mattress from now on. Thursday, 3rd December 2009

As you might have picked up, I’m in sixth year now and, like most people in my year, I’m trying desperately to save up to do lots of fun things with my friends next summer (in my case, camping, T in the Park and the Edinburgh Fringe) while still being able to do fun things before then. I’m also trying to manage this without a regular, paying job.

Until about two weeks ago all my money was in my current account but since I do have the ability to spend money without realising I phoned up the bank and got them to set up an ISA for me to save up in. It all went fine and I moved most of my money into my ISA and left about £130 in my current account for Christmas shopping and anything else I needed to buy.

All going fine until today. I was ordering a bit of Christmas shopping off the Tesco Direct site (which is a rant in itself, why can’t they put that stuff in the store too?) and you have to do a verification thing if you’re using a Visa card, but over the last few days my mum and Granddad had both had to ring up the bank to get through it, so I wasn’t overly surprised when it wouldn’t accept me either, although slightly annoyed. So I rang up the bank again and told them I was having problems with it and the lady on the phone took my details and then told me I had 69p in my bank account. Now, I’ve spent around £30 since I made my ISA, and for once, I’m certain I haven’t spent any more without realising, so naturally I was a bit confused and she went through my last months transactions and there was nothing weird, but I just told her I’d go and check myself online and try and figure it out and then call back.

I tootled off to the internet banking page and logged in, only to get stumped by the “Memorable Information” section. Apparently I hadn’t made it memorable enough. So then I went through and made up a new one which I should remember. And then it told me to ring them up to verify it. So I rang them up again and finally got through.

Sure enough, my current account had 69p in it, and my ISA had all the money I’d transferred in. I went to check my statement for my current account to find that when I’d set up my ISA two weeks ago, the man setting it up had told me I had £100 more than I really did in my account, so instead of leaving myself £130 for Christmas shopping, I only had £30 left. Now, I know I only had 6 presents to buy this year, but £30 really isn’t enough, especially since I’ve already spent it all.

So now I have to buy my two last presents on the £40 Mum owes me, and hope all my extended family just give me money for Christmas. I do realise I could take money out of my ISA, but at the minute I can just about afford either the Fringe or T in the Park (thank god camping won’t cost much) so I don’t want to be making the fund smaller already.

I have quite a lot to blog about at the minute, but no time to do it. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up at the weekend. I always get stupidly busy right before the holidays.