The unexpected

Fred fancied some news shoes. We popped into all our usual shoe-shopping places, but there was nothing that Fred fancied. The search continues.

We met Jason and Jennie later at Somerset House to experience In the Beginning was the End, an interactive theatre production about mass production and capitalism.

We (a group of 12) were led down under Somerset House and into a board room where we sat around a long table with a screen on the wall. A lady came in and started talking profit and loss accounts, an argument happened in another boardroom, which we could see on the screen. Our lady ran out of the room and the lady from the other boardroom came into ours, sat down and started reading from a book in Spanish. Then, a siren sounded, the lights went out and we were in pitch dark... the wall rolled back behind us and we were in a laboratory, which we were free to explore, pressing buttons, opening things and roaming into rooms. We found scientists gibbering in other languages and writing equations on walls, robots that weren't behaving as they should (quite hilarious), and on another floor I stepped into a corridor and a naked man was running towards me - he disappeared into a room with his supervisor running after him. He'd come from a 'customer service' room where people were answering letters of complaint to disgruntled customers who'd purchased the robots (who weren't behaving well outside of the factory). One by one, the customer service agents stood up, took their clothes off and ran out. We were then free to look at all the letters on the computers, which were very funny indeed. Further down the corridor we met the senior staff members who were in freefall - either falling (on unseen ropes) outside the windows of the building, or drowning in fishtanks. Oh dear.

Brilliant!