Warming Up

Took the tribe to Covent Garden this morning to take part in a virtual panic room even based on Alice in Wonderland. We were going with friends, meeting two of them there, though when we got off the tube at Covent Garden we found ourselves immediately walking next to them, which saved some texting and felt like we’d aced the first task in the game. I didn’t really know what to expect from the experience and Catie couldn’t remember what had prompted her to book, but it was mainly fun for most of us. We didn’t dress up, but plenty of other people did and there seemed to be a lot of groups taking part. It was a bit confusing to begin with and we didn’t really understand the first clue we chanced across, but I managed to reverse engineer the answer and it became a bit clearer as we pushed onwards. 

Phoebe took control of the navigation and was better than I’d been. I never seem able to consistently follow maps and wonder if that is a consequence of my aphantasia - I am terrible at thinking in three dimensions and turning a 2D object into a 3D one. But I might just be stupid. 

The experience was a bit much for the littlest one in our group, but it took a couple of hours before he got really bored and the map kept on popping up new challenges so it seemed like the rabbit hole would never end. You could skip over bits by taking a time penalty, which we utilised a little bit and then, at lunchtime we decided to abandon the quest, though then discovered a brand new one of finding a restaurant in Covent Garden that wasn’t all booked up. This took us away from the playing field up to Holborn, where things weren’t so packed and we had pizzas that we’d probably earned from so much walking and carrying a five year old around! 

We completed the trail from Holborn by taking time penalties and making some guesses and ended up about three hours outside the the top 100, but at least we were eating pizza, not prannying around Covent Garden dressed as the Mad Hatter. So we won.

On the way home a couple of fans of the podcast said hello to me at Finsbury Park station and wanted a photo. Phoebe sidled over and whispered to me “tell them that I am the Victorian Ghost Child”. It turned out that the men didn’t watch Twitch of Fun and Phoebe was too nervous to talk to them anyway, but that terrible comedians’ instinct to seek the approval of strangers seems to have passed down to the next generation. One of the men tried to politely say that he’d get a photo with Phoebe too, but then realised that that would be pretty inappropriate, which showed an unusual level of social awareness for a RHLSTP fan. Ernie, perhaps more confused about why two people I didn’t know wanted to talk to me, asked if the men were my friends. So I told him they were to save a lot of weird questions. They were nice men, one of whom went to school with Matt Lucas and had some interesting revelations, so I gave him some interesting revelations about David Walliams to make things fair.

It had been cool to have a day in London and due to some weird deal when travelling with kids we got return tickets with travel cards for three adults and two children for about £35. I suppose train travel is so ridiculously expensive that when you get a deal like that it blows your fucking mind.