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The idea of being on stage doesn’t frighten me. The idea of being on stage with my own script is extremely uncomfortable. It might be shit y’know.

I was coerced into giving a talk at a conference in Tromsø, in November by my former boss. Then I was asked back, but this time a somewhat larger conference… on a fucking ship. Colloquially known as “Danskebåten” (the Danish boat) -it’s a small cruise ship/large ferry that runs daily from Oslo to Copenhagen.

I accepted – mostly coz I never been to Denmark. Also, I was asked in December, and at the time March 7 was light years away. The ball started rolling and it wasn’t long before 8 of my colleagues were booked to go to the conference, including my boss.

So, that’s the backstory. This is the problem. I seem to black out when I do these things. I come prepared, I got my powerpoint, I got my script… I get up and do my thing – and then after I CANNOT REMEMBER A FUCKING THING I SAID.

Does this happen to other people? It’s like being drunk off ones tits. Bits and pieces come back after a while, but most of the hour is gone. And it drives me insane. I remember perhaps 5-7 minutes out of the hour-ish I spoke. So in my mind, I was completely incoherent – a bit of this, then a bit of that, then some other stuff and nothing connects or adds up to anything that would make sense in any known universe.

Everyone said I did really well. But they would say that wouldn’t they? Like, if your friend walked through a crowded restaurant with her skirt firmly stuffed into her underpants – you’d say “oh sweetie, nobody saw!” even if you know everyone saw her once-white-now-gray grannie panties. *sigh* All I can say is – it is a total bitch not knowing what happened for a full hour, when you know about 100 people were watching you during that hour.

Also I didn’t know what to do with my legs. One of the things I vividly remember is trying to figure out how to stand with my legs like a normal person. I think I was doing some sort of weird jig behind the podium when I suddenly became overly aware of the fact that I have legs.

I guess I much prefer to be in front of the stage screaming, than on stage speaking.

*

Oh and Denmark, or I should say Copenhagen. We got on a shuttle bus to somewhere that might have been the city centre, and dropped off in front of a department store. G*d give me John Lewis or Debenhams any day! I can’t even begin to describe how wrong it all was. Only thing I will say is – the book shop was hidden away on the top floor in a corner and didn’t carry English books. Wrong! All so very wrong! I got out, trekked around till I found a book shop that had something in a language I can read and then shuttle-bus’ed the fuck outta there. (Ok, yea, I did buy two really expensive tops as well, but I felt like a rant against the lack of literature available. Bloody Danes!)

But screw Denmark, and screw blacking out… The boat trip was super fun, how could it not be with fabulous travel companions? I work with amazingly funny and crazy people and that is pure joy!

A few months ago I was lucky enough to score some tickets for the recording of the final episode of this series of HIGNFY. A little while later Camilla announced she had decided we should go for our much planned but never accomplished trip to London this year. Ok, I said - we’re going june 6th. Ok she said. Then Kari heard and decided to join forces. Girly trip to the best city in the world!

Due to various things we all met up at OSL and immediately found an Ok Sushi! — good times.

After sushi we got on our plane and landed at LHR at approximately 2100. Passport queue kinda hellish, but not as bad as advertised; I realized my passport is lacking some sort of fast-track thing (not iris recognition) – and after some stumbling around we managed to get ourselves in the wrong queue — the “rest of the world” one. Much waiting, much grumbling and absolutely no help to be told at the front of the line we coulda gone through faster in another line. No help!

Then we (I?) decided to tube it into town; as I’d heard someone, somewhere say the tube is often faster than the LHR Express. This is not true. Much grumbling while rattling around with huge suitcases on longest tube journey ever. I started to wonder if the hotel might give our room away if we didn’t show up until after midnight. We skipped the changing of trains from the Picadilly Line to the Jubilee Line, and went for a cab at Green Park as we didn’t know the exact location of the hotel, and randomly scrambling about the Waterloo Station area was not tempting. Cabbie managed to take us to the wrong hotel. The right hotel was, however, right across the street. Only problem was, the only place to cross the 4 lane street in this area was right in front of our nose as we exited the wrong hotel, and we missed it completely — so after some grumbling we had to run for it, across four lanes, suitcases in tow, hoping not to get hit by something. Seeing the inside of A&E was not on our list of stuff to do.

Alive and well at the right hotel we checked in and found or lovely room, disrobed somewhat, and popped some warm tax-free champagne. Then the fire alarm went off. The following was a quite interesting study of human psychology. One of our party scampered and was next seen in the lobby, the other member of our party somewhat hurried walked down the ten flights of stairs. The third member of our party slowly descended, cursing false alarms, cursing the lack of shoes, cursing the 10th floor room and cursing the fact that the iPhone was back in the room so she couldn’t even tweet about the arse-tasticness of false alarms. This was obviously me.

After the whole hotel had gathered in the lobby in various degrees of undress we were told it was indeed a false alarm on the 13th floor. Yay bedtime! But, alas no. Turns out we were too hungry to sleep, so we needed room service. Fish & chips, and then bed time. At 0200. Great way to start a holiday.

We did manage to get up before noon on Thursday, and I dragged the chicas to Garfunkel’s on Tottenham Ct. Rd. for brekkie. Lovely as usual. Then we hit Primark. I think that place gets more insane every day.

I finished up early and got yelled at by a security guard for sitting down in the entrance area. I was blocking nothing, but he told me to stand up or he’d phone an ambulance. Wanker. Severe misuse of the ambulance services. I obviously stood up, but c’mon. Sitting down when your legs hurt is a fucking human right.

Somehow time went by much to fast, and suddenly I realized we only had time for a pit stop back to the hotel and dinner if we were gonna make the HIGNFY recording. Some stumbling about later we’d wasted so much time we had to do “dinner” at Burger King, much to the dismay of my fellow travellers. Camilla and I then jumped in a cab and headed for the ITV studios, and got in line. After a few minutes a lady poked me and asked if we were in line for Graham Norton. We were in the wrong line. Found the HIGNFY line and stood around for a good long while there until they started letting people in. Only as the queue started moving I looked behind us and saw maybe 20 people behind us in line. PANIC. The things are obviously overbooked as the studio needs to be full. I was sure we’d get cut off. But luckily, we got in – the cut off point was maybe 6-7 people behind us. So glad we cabbed it and didn’t try to walk. We got seats in the furthest back row on Paul’s side, which meant I got and excellent view of Ian Hislop. He is just as lovely live as on the telly. He kept making cute Ian faces all night while ranting about the BBC coverage of the Queen’s Jubilee and whatever else was in the news that week. Kirsty Young hosted, complete pro, so the retakes were few. Bit disappointed to get a news reader hosting the one time I get to go, as they say the retakes can be the funniest bit – but such is luck.

I was able to snap a few sneaky pictures on my way out, picture taking was totally banned in the studio and they threatened to reset our phones if we did. Leaked photos of the set pre recording would obviously be a huge spoiler as it’s only looked the same for -oh I dunno – 22 years?

Friday I envisioned we’d “do” Oxford Street and we started in Selfridges. We immediately lost each other and thus made very ineffective time around Selfridges. Then we went for Forever 21, and managed to do the same there. After a third version of this in Debenhams it was again just time for dinner and then get to The Comedy Store for Best in Standup at 1930. We got there so late we got the wonderful front-row-centre seats and braced for being picked on by the comics. We made it through the first three acts, but then when the last act of the night did a sucking cock song off which the punch line was spitting on the stage we completely lost it — I think I screamed in shock at the audacity of spitting on the stage of the Comedy Store and covered my eyes, and also halfway fell into Camilla’s lap — all this combined with the fact we hadn’t had time to change into evening wear we probably looked a bit innocent and preppy, so the comic in question continued to give us cheeky comments when he made dirty jokes. “You three don’t like me, do ya?”. We did though. Just don’t spit on the holy grail, mmkay?

Saturday we headed for the London Sea Life Aquarium for some tranquil fishy fun. Lovely sea horses, huge turtles and scary sharkies. Not to mention penguins, you cannot not be entertained by penguins doing their waddle-waddle-dive-swim. Much ocean love. Also paid £20 for a greenscreen faux picture of us in Antarctica. Good times.

We had dinner at an Indian restaurant and did a tourist bus to see some sights. Again no time to change into evening wear before our evening entertainment, we went to see Chicago as the compulsory West End musical one must include in every London visit. To make it to the theatre in time we jumped in a bicycle rickshaw – I miscalculated the distance a little bit and we ended paying the guy £30 for a fast and terrifying ride through the streets of London.

Chicago was excellent fun – great cast, great fun – infidelity, murder and burlesque pants can never be wrong.

Sunday morning I packed the girls into a cab with instructions to the Gatwick Express at Victoria. For me it was time to change hotels and geek off on my own for two days. First I headed out to the V&A and poked around a bit looking at lovely dresses from the 1700- and 1800′s, and had some fun in the gift shop.

Then off to the Science Museum where I spent most of the rest of the day. Went 3D flying with the Red Arrows and tried my hand at a fighter jet sim — where I lost control of the aircraft twice and hung upside down in the harness pulling on the controls and trying to get the horizon thingy to come around the right way up. Good times indeed. Didn’t see nearly enough, so both the V&A and the Science Museum need to be revisited.

Sunday evening is of course impro night at The Comedy Store. I was super hyped as I’ve never seen Paul Merton improvise live before. Rest of the line-up were Andy Smart, Lee Simpson, Neil Mullarkey, Richard Vranch and Suki Webster (all seen before and known to be awesome).

For the first game, “Die“, they needed, as always, a historical figure. I surprised myself by shouting “Alexander the Great” – and indeed the story was “Alexander the Great and the boiled egg”. Then it was time for “Film and Theatre styles” where they wanted a suggestion for a place two people might work closely together — “Ambulance Helicopter” I shouted, and indeed Paul and Andy spent the next 10 minutes in an ambulance helicopter doing several styles including musical and opera. Too many giggles to remember any particular jokes. I kept my mouth shut for “Emotions” and the “Job” game – but for “Three headed expert” I had to try for biathlon. Much hilarity when Paul didn’t realize biathlon is winter Olympics, on skis. The animal in question to the trained to do the Olympic sport were giraffes, but again I’ve forgotten the jokes. Like they say, you had to be there. Also Neil Mullarkey smiled at me as we passed each other on our way to/from the bar during the break — good times

Monday morning I was up bright and early and got myself two pair of shoes at Schuh before I went on a wild goose chase on the tube that involved the Circle and Hammersmith & City line trying to get to Westfield.

Damn you London Tube Planner, I didn’t need to go to Wood Lane, I coulda taken the Central line to White fucking City. Westfield is one huge shopping centre, with a whole helluva lotta cool shops. I almost melted my credit card before I managed to get out – and took the Central Line from White City back into town. The rest of the evening I had to spend packing as I had overdone it slightly and didn’t fancy skipping over the road to Muji to buy extra luggage (been there, done that in 2010).

Lovely cabbie drove me to Victoria Station tuesday morning, we talked about HIGNFY and the Hislop – “he just speaks sense dunn’e?” –

and then I had some more accidents of the credit card kind in the tax free at LGW before I boarded my flight back to Norway (TRD).

edit.

Note to self; trying to make a funny based on a 10+ yr old Tori Amos quote…. backefires and makes one look nuttier than one is.

It’s lovely and summery in Tromsø right now; and the view from my balcony is as Norwegian as it could possibly get.