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I had tried to get a tour manager for the one off gig in Halifax tonight, but to no avail and I really needed to get home after the show as it’s my wife’s birthday tomorrow. So I was back behind the wheel of my car for a whole lot of driving (with the comparatively easy task of doing 90 minutes of comedy in between - that I still had to learn and expand from 60-65 minutes). The drive up took me six hours with a half hour stop for lunch and a 4 minute stop to wee in some trees behind a parking spot on the A1M. The place I weed in was littered with bottles (and I imagine the wee of a lot of other men who had similarly got caught short or just didn’t fancy wasting time going into the proper facilities - about 2 minutes up the road as it happened). There were beer bottles and a vodka bottle there and I wondered who it was who was driving up to this little copse in the middle of nowhere to drink vodka amongst a thousand men’s wee. It’s the kind of thing you might think teenagers would do, but then most teenagers can’t drive and those that can can probably get into pubs. And there didn’t seem to be a town nearby so the only way to get here was to drive and if you were driving then you hopefully weren’t going to be drinking vodka. Had someone come up with a great way to make some money by taking bus loads of 14 year olds here to a place they wouldn’t be discovered, to get mildly drunk, before driving them home again. Or was it simply a place where dogging went on and the people who liked to watch strangers having sex in a pissy copse brought drinks along, before hitching a ride home in their car. I don’t know. But I think this might be the saddest place to drink vodka. It was one of the saddest places just to have a wee.
The journey home was much quicker, as there weren’t too many traffic jams and only one late-night road closure and I was home in 3 hours 20 minutes with only a stop to buy some diesel in Halifax and no need to wee anywhere (thank goodness because by this time the copses of the A1M would be full of the weird individuals who go there to drink spirits and deeply breathe in the stench of uric acid in the soil and leaves, whilst wanking over some loveless sex.
I was tired, but kept alert and concentrated well because I didn’t want to leave my family without a family, especially not if all I’d been doing was mildly entertaining about 200 people in Halifax. And my resolve to stay alive, already strong, was solidified by passing what looked like a very recent accident in the darkness. I couldn’t tell exactly what had happened but a man was in the road waving a light to warn us to slow down. Behind him was one of those trucks that you can load cars up on to, though it was empty. I don’t know if he was there because he’d been in the accident or been called to pick up the car in the accident or had just been the vehicle behind and had stopped to prevent further injury. After the truck the road was strewn with mud and bits of pieces of rubbish - I thought a lorry had shed its load, but I think more likely that the car in the accident had been on to the the central reservation and the spinning wheels had spread muck all over the road. But it looked like something had exploded. And then there was a car crunched up against the barriers, in total darkness. I didn’t have time to see if there were people inside or really what the state of the car was, but my best guess was that this had more or less just happened and that someone had fallen asleep at the wheel and drifted into the central reservation. No ambulances or police were there yet. It was all totally dark. The car headlights weren’t even on. It was haunting. And a reminder of the stupidity of trying to attempt a 9 or 10 hour round trip when you’re already hardly been sleeping. Hopefully everyone was OK.
I didn’t crash and die. Unless I did and that was the ghost of me driving past the wreck that killed me.
The gig in Halifax had gone way better than I thought it would when I listened and relistened to my show in the car. I pretty much managed to remember it all, as well as chuck in a couple of new and a couple of old and a couple of cut routines to bring the thing up to 90 minutes. I only had 200 people in in a 1100 seater theatre (I think the comedy festival organisers had over estimated my pulling power, but to be fair, getting 200 people in a town I’ve never played before was a triumph for me. And they liked the show. And it was lovely to have time to let the routines breathe a bit, after the usual rush to fit stuff into too short a time at the Fringe.
As excited as I was to get through a familiar but unfamiliar show, I was even more excited to test out my latest gadget, a credit card machine that connects up to your phone to allow me to take card payments for merchandise. It worked perfectly, so as long as there is some kind of phone or wifi access in the venues I play I should be able to do this from now on. I went for iZettle, purely because the cab driver who got me to the Leicester Square Theatre last week had one and said it was good (and also listened to my podcasts, so he must have great taste). I am blown away by the things that tech allows us to do these days. And contactless payment via a card and a phone and a gizmo is amazing (though one man did use his pin code and kindly told me what it was when I asked him for it - I think he may have been drinking).
Home before 1.30am to a bagel with Marmite on it, some Barry Norman Pickled onions and a large glass of malt whisky. Strong tastes. But the thought of them had pulled me like a beacon to my home for the previous two hours.
Tour gigs coming up in Manchester (may be sold out) and Bristol this year. Will be in Liverpool next week, but just doing a stand up set. A few of the 2018 gigs are drifting into my gig guide, but they will all be announced soon.
Look here for details.
