"Next, she's at college, studying IT, but mostly going into the games room looking for boys. It's here that Love meets this unnamed lad. He was damn crazy, Love tells me over Zoom a few days later. She's stuck at home in south-west London, waiting for a delivery. We didn't do red flags then. He just had some issues, but I wanted to nurture, and didn't recognise the warnings. At that age, you don't know yourself, or what a good relationship is."
"As she tells it, the first date didn't sound promising: He came to my mum's house, stripped naked and cried. Still, round two nonetheless followed (he was six foot four! And had a six pack!), this time at his place. He made them spag bol and then, from nowhere, forced her upstairs and into the shower, holding her hostage for the best part of 48 hours."
"You try to convince yourself it isn't happening. She shakes her head in retrospective disbelief. And then: oh, it actually is. Momentarily, she contemplated the worst. I decided not to go down that rabbit hole. That wasn't going to be my legacy. Get out alive; I'll survive anything else. Today, again, she recounts it all, and her lucky escape, with a playful buoyancy."
Judi Love was 17 when she was kidnapped and later incorporates the experience into her stand-up, sometimes adding a couple of years for stage effect. The anecdote features in her developing show All About the Love, which is set for a 23-date tour next year and includes crowd work, stories from her social-work background, and playful performance bits. While at college she met an unnamed man who later held her captive for roughly 48 hours. She chose to focus on survival, escaped, and now recounts the ordeal with buoyant humour that blends trauma and comedy.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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