Tea cosies, booze and Simon Amstell

I've had a great weekend involving all of the above items. Fortunately they weren't all at once, that would have been a bit odd and probably rather confusing for Simon Amstell.

It was Chris' birthday on Friday, so we had a number of nice things planned over the weekend to celebrate this auspicious occasion. We had a nice dinner at home on Friday accompanied by a bottle of Marks and Spencer Vouvray (one of my favourite wines, try it!) and then we had a cosy night in doing SingStar on his new wireless SingStar microphones.

Then on Saturday we went for a Birthday High Tea at the Tea Cosy teashop. You may have seen it briefly on Brighton Beach Patrol on Channel 5 last week. Basically it's a camp little teashop crammed to bursting with royal memorabilia, where they do great tea and cakes and sandwiches and things. The guy who runs it is lovely and always keeps us entertained with local gossip.

I had the Princess Margaret Memorial Low Tea, which came with the most yummy lemon Madeira cake ever. It was the size of a breeze block too, so I was on a bit of a sugar and caffeine rush for quite a while afterwards and had to have a bit of a lie down in the afternoon (I'm such an old woman)

And then in the evening we had people over and then went to We Luv Pop's We Luv Movie Soundtracks at the Hanbury Ballroom. Chris had decided our evening should have a fancy dress theme, and that theme ended up being "Things you never thought you'd wear again". It was subverted a little by some people buying new fancy dress outfits for it, but they were so horrific we decided it was admissible. Chris and I went in our school uniforms, and were both quite smug that they still fitted fairly well.

The We Luv Movie Soundtracks theme was great (from what I remember), and we did quite a lot of crazy dancing to such classics as Dance Magic Dance and the Neverending Story. It was really busy in there too, which was good. It's run by Dynamite Sal who used to do Dynamite Boogaloo, so I'm glad it's doing well.

Sunday was a necessarily more subdued day, and all I really wanted to do was loaf about and watch Come Dine With Me. We couldn't do that all day though, because we had tickets to see Simon Amstell's stand up show at the Brighton Dome in the evening. We saw him there last year too, and he's been really good both times.

Lots of his act this year seemed to revolve around him being a bit lonely and crap at relationships, which made me think awwwwwww and want to give him a hug. He also said that his ideal man is one who is skinny (check), only says about three sentences an hour (check), and is rather sickly (check!). So I'm definitely in there if I ever get to meet him. I'm not 18 unfortunately, his other stipulation, but I might be able to get him to overlook that with enough vodka.

Sometimes with celebrities who seem a bit vulnerable like that, I think "aw I bet we'd be really good friends". Which is a stupid thing to think I know, because what he says on stage quite possibly bears no relation to how he is in real life. He might be horrible. He's certainly very highly strung I think. You can tell that he's quite tense about his act going well, he doesn't really like hecklers (even good natured ones), and he got quite cross in the middle of his act about the spotlight not following him properly. I imagine he's quite high maintenance. But he's so sweet, I just wanted to take him home with me.

Chris seemed to have a very good birthday weekend anyway, with all these activities to entertain him. I'm thoroughly exhausted now though and will need to try to catch up on some sleep. Particularly as we're probably having another big night out next weekend (again at the Hanbury, which seems to be taking all my money at the moment) for Boogaloo Stu's Pop Kraft.

Honestly, with all this socialising and debauchery it's getting quite difficult to maintain my shy and retiring image.