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Catie and Phoebe went back to London this morning and Giles the Cannibal was heading to Australia (I don’t think just to get away from me), so I had to do the final date of this tough 11 day run on my own. First I had to pack up all the crap you need to have with you if you’re stupid enough to have a baby and then drive my family over to the train station. I foolishly left my sat nav in the room and had to rush back to get it, which lost us two valuable minutes, which would prove costly. We missed the train by seconds, but we did get to see it pulling away as we struggled to get through the barrier. So, that was fun.
Then the long drive across country to Birmingham. I took it slow and stopped off a couple of times so that I could steal a single pick n mix and keep up my cat and mouse game with Ian WH Smith. He will never catch me. I even tweet him now to let him know what I am doing, but in spite of all his magazines, bookazines and pens, he can do nothing. I was more concerned about the drive home after the gig. I had a lot of reasons to be tired, but somehow I kept going until 1am. 44 tour shows down, 35 (though more keep getting added) to go. But who’s counting? If I am honest I only just have. It feels like I’ve just started really so amazing to think that I am well over halfway through. My guess is that the ones I have done will pay for last year’s Edinburgh (and the tour expenses) and that seems like a good trade off to me. Touring is still proving economically viable, though I am not sure about the emotional side. As with most of life it’s all about finding the right balance: earning enough money to bring up my family, but not working so hard that I can’t be there to see them grow. Once again modest success might be the path to happiness - no one is forcing me out on the road for 250 dates a year to milk me like a cash cow. Because I am just a cash otter. You can milk me a bit and my milk is delicious (as anyone who has drunk otter milk will attest), but there’s not enough there for an enterprising milk salesman to make much of a profit. But if I don’t feel like being milked one year no one is going to get cross about it, because there’s so much delicious cow milk to flog off for a massive profit (I am now envisaging all touring comedians as different kind of lactating animals, though some of them manage to pass off their piss as milk).
I was frazzled by the time I made it to the Glee, but the staff looked after me well, put all my programmes out for me and left me alone to recuperate. The figures I’d had last week were a bit lower than I’d been hoping for so I was surprised to find out that the gig was sold out. The crowd were a little slow to warm up I thought (these comedy club gigs usually hit the ground running), but they were soon on board. I had some fun with their takeaway shop, “Mr Eggâ€, imagining that in Birmingham you have to sell whatever your surname dictates - bad news for Mr Dildo and with the city’s reputation of being 100% Muslim. At the end of the first half I remarked that I could smell popcorn, but everyone said they couldn’t and I wondered if I was having a stroke. But I should have remembered that the Glee do sell popcorn (one year they gave me some to take home and it was partly due to reaching over to the passenger seat to find some that I came the closest I’ve been to having a crash). They brought me some in the interval (and thanked me for advertising their service- this is how it begins) and though I have eaten way too much junk this week and am looking a bit chubby I figured that I could do with the sugar to get me through all that was to come. But as I explained when I got back on stage, eating popcorn or crisps before a gig is the first thing they tell you not to do at Comedy University. The bits get caught in your throat or sprayed across the front row. I did have a few moments where errant bits of corn husk found their way to the back of my throat, but did do some observational comedy about me being the type of person who eats the unpopped corn at the bottom of the packet. I was dong it backstage, thinking how inconvenient it would be if I cracked my teeth on it and wondering why I bothered as it gave me little pleasure beyond the danger of dental destruction.
My teeth remained intact and I got home without incident, looking forward to a couple of days of relaxation with my daughter (though aware that that stretches the definition of relaxation).
