On the night I’m due to attend You Me Bum Bum Train, an immersive theatre show cloaked in so much mystery that I know next to nothing about it, I have reached my December peak. It happens every year: at some point, usually the week before Christmas, my immune system simply gives up. And who can blame it? By this juncture in the wildly ambitious festive social calendar, my body is approximately 33 per cent cheese, 33 per cent prosecco, and 33 per cent whatever Christmas-themed chocolate has been left lying around. I have enjoyed too big a tranche of merriment for too long a time, and now I must pay the price.
So it is that I drag myself across London on a Thursday night, a limping husk of a woman. My throat is sore and gravelly, my nose full of mucus, my head swimming with brain fog. To say I am “not in the mood” to go to a theatrical event described in the otherwise cryptic ticket information as “physically challenging and intense” is as gross an understatement as saying I’m “not in the mood” for a cervical examination. The thing is so demanding that those who could be pregnant or have any underlying medical conditions are forbidden from participating “due to the high risk of harm”. I’ve been dissuaded from coming should I suffer from claustrophobia, told to wear flat shoes and trousers, and warned to expect periods of darkness, nudity, strobe lights, blood and scenes “that some may find distressing”.
