Yesterday was spent zigzagging across London to try and keep various appointments. At about 4pm I bumped into Bryn from Tooting's favourite “couldn't care less if guitar strings break on stage, it's actually pretty funny” band, Montana Pete, who asked me where I was rushing off to. “Kenwood House in Hampstead, to watch Jamie Cullum,” I replied. How true that was.

In Jenny's capacity as features ed on a food mag, we were invited to attend this jazz-poppet's gig as the special guests of a company who make cereal bars. They kindly paid for our tickets, supplied us with a £75 food hamper, champagne, and an extremely large quantity of aforementioned cereal bars.

It was bloody cold yesterday evening. Concerts at Kenwood feature a stage on one side of a lake, and the audience on the other, either seated in deckchairs at the front (the equivalent of the stalls, expensive) or on picnic rugs further back, up the hill. We were in the equivalent of the Upper Dress Circle, and a fierce wind blew off Hampstead Heath, threatening us with death from exposure. But first we had to contend with exposure to the support act, Lucie Silvas, who provided 20 minutes of completely unremarkable warbling over the top of deeply unimaginative piano-led chord sequences. “Mariah Carey's got a lot to answer for,” said Jenny. Most of the crowd were happy to tuck into their food and allow her inter-song banter (“Thang-you! Yeah! Hope you're all OK, sidding up there! This song's called Everybody Ged Some Of This Go Crazy” etc etc) to wash over them. We opened the £75 hamper to find a bottle of plonk, a couple of salads, aeroplane bread rolls, some asparagus, cheese and 2 Kipling-style pecan pies. I could have made up the self-same hamper for £30, and still made a healthy profit. Still, it helped to stave off the cold.

Jamie Cullum is a talented chap. But he was so far away that I'd have been better off sitting at home listening to a CD, although you probably wouldn't have managed to get me to do that unless you put a £75 hamper and a load of cereal bars in my living room. One thing he should do is just shut the f*ck up in between songs. I don't often go to big gigs, so perhaps the general standard of banter between performer and audience is horribly poor, but he should never venture into any kind of public speaking. He's very good and jumping up and down and running around the stage, but he's rubbish, and I mean rubbish, at telling a joke. For example: “We took a few days off recently, and we got to go sailing! Yeah, it was amazing, I got to operate the jib, you know, everything. In fact – I felt like a right seaman.” The joke, popular at one time among 12 year old boys, was presumably that seaman sounds rather like semen. The thousands of people sitting there, awaiting the next tune from their very own Mr Harry Connick Jnr, felt strongly that it was a rotten attempt at humour, and decided to remain quiet. Jamie seemed surprised, and crestfallen. “Oh. Are you laughing?” No, Jamie, we're not.