“There are girlies here at the back, everyone!”

I’VE become a creature of routine; a routine that’s been shaped and formed by living in the same house, with the same people, for a long, long time.

It’s erratic and syncopated but a routine, nevertheless.

On Saturdays, when I wake between warm sheets, drink a pot of tea and read my book, routine can feel like sublime grace… a kind of surprise benediction even. In the main, however, the familiar whirligig of domestic routine feels comfortable: making toast, walking through my front door, coming home with the Sunday papers, having a bath, watching rubbish telly with my daughters under a duvet … the whirligig feels good, most of the time.

Of course there are occasions — hanging out the washing: pants, pants, knickers, pants and moving onto socks (repeat) or fishing apple-core blockages out of the mid-section of the Hoover hose — when routine becomes an odd mix of enervation and astonishment, as in, ‘how the hell can it be possible that I’m doing this again, already?’ And other times when any kind of routine suddenly starts to feel like a hot, itchy jumper that I want to pull off; times when I wake up and don’t want the ordinary and every day, I want to be blown the feck out of it.

It was this feeling that propelled me to London on Friday and it’s why I’m standing now, inside the Royal Vauxhall Tavern — a grubby gay dive that plays host to avant-garde cabaret shows — just south of the Thames, at 5 o’clock on Sunday afternoon. My friend and I are waiting big-eyed at the back of the pub for drag-artist Jonathan Hellyer to arrive on stage and perform the cult hit, The Dame Edna Experience. I’m here on the back of a two-minute Google skim; a whim.

It feels like I’m in a hive of gay bees: hundreds of men swarm everywhere. The physical type is encyclopaedic; tall, small, young, old, fat, thin, bald, hirsute, ordinary, beautiful and beast-like; all benign, all busy. A man walks past in pastel skinnies, smiles and says my necklace is absolutely gorgeous, darling, looks back over his shoulder, says gorgeous again. Another boy squeals “girlies”, when he sees us, in theatrical surprise. “There are girlies here at the back, everyone!” he repeats and we feel spotlighted, slightly cowed; in this thronged, buzzing hive, we make up the straight minority of two.

But I’m too excited to care because right now, there’s a shift in atmosphere; the buzzing escalates, a seismic ripple of anticipation spreads across the pub. All eyes are onstage. I see a stilettoed foot, a slim, shapely leg ease slowly through a small gap in the red curtains. The pub erupts in whoops and whistles while the rest of Dame Edna follows, in all her glory.

In some ways, the Dame Edna Experience is formulaic and easily described: she’s wearing a sequinned mini-dress, spangled tights, a mauve wig and inexpertly applied lipstick, for one thing. She’s singing hackneyed songs and telling filthy jokes, for another. She has a natural fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants delivery. And she’s talented: her vocal range is extraordinary, the tone of her note-perfect voice is lovely. Dame Edna is vulgar, bitchy, funny, camp and kitsch — but she’s also clever. Her wits are sharp as boning knives; the way she eviscerates the punters — that poor Iranian and hapless Welshman in the front row — is cripplingly funny but chilling too, as in, oh god, what if I’m next?

But it’s not so easy to explain the emotional arc of the experience; how she takes cheesy songs, which have been so overplayed that they’ve lost all their meaning — and by some demoniac enchantment, turns them into something strangely moving. She breathes something, I don’t know what, into mawkish lyrics — and works some odd alchemy on them… makes you feel — like the chambers of your heart are gently expanding, while inexplicable emotions (I mean, she’s doing all this in ludicrous horn-rimmed specs and a blue-rinse wig, for god’s sake) swirl madly into them.

Towards the end, she takes her specs and wig off. She stands there before she sings her final song. And I can see him, for the first time. He’s a handsome, lithe man; a trickster who’s blown me off course, made me forget all about fishing apple-core blockages out of the mid-section of the Hoover hose and feel, instead, like a child who’s unwrapped the last layer of paper off the present in Pass-the-Parcel, and found exactly what she’s always wanted in the middle.