Breakfast in Bridlington with Nicholas Parsons (and others - we weren't sharing a room and that wasn't what I had to do to land the JAM gig). I googled Somersetshire to prove that I was right. Not that I am one to hold on to a bone and never let it go (again, that was not how I got the JAM gig).
Then I got a taxi to the station - a small market had been set up in the entrance hall, with people selling bric-a-brac and at least three men competing to sell model railway engines and accoutrements. There were a few customers milling around, but not enough to justify quite so many model railway stores. I suspected that they mainly just ended up selling stuff to each other.
After the long trip I got little chance to rest up, even though I was pretty exhausted after little sleep last night (because there had been quite a lot of early morning noise at the hotel and not because of the sexual demands of the octogenarian panel show host, determined to teach me a lesson about what would happen if I buzzed in too much), but we were pretty much straight back on the road as we were heading to Norfolk in order to attend our bridesmaid's third birthday tomorrow.
My wife and I were staying the night in a pub in Bungay and with a rare Saturday night off, we decided to go out on the town and see what the sleeping Norfolk town had to offer. After a Thai meal we went to a charming looking old pub for a pint or two. It all seemed sleepy and pleasant enough, but as we sat in the snug with my wife's best friend at about 9pm violence suddenly erupted in the bar. I couldn't see what was happening, but it was still made for an interesting listen. Voices were raised, chubby flesh was being pummeled, a woman was shouting at John asking him to desist, there was mention of £200 that had gone unpaid. It went on for quite a while. My favourite comments was from a man calmly saying, "Not inside lads, not inside." As if it was perfectly OK for them to be battering each other, but disappointing that they had broken the code of pub fighting and were creating this disturbance inside. Finally the men were pulled apart though the argument continued and one of them managed to get a final slap in. Remarkably neither man was ejected from the pub as far as I could tell. Which seemed quite forgiving and also a recipe for disaster. I couldn't imagine they were both going to leave this. This didn't seem like a situation that more alcohol was going to resolve.
We decided to move on to another pub, although there were even more over-excited men in this one, as if Bungay goes feral on a Saturday night. There was a disco in the pub that we were staying in over the road, but a gang of disappointed men were coming away from that. A fat, bald man complaining that the disco had only men in it. He was obviously on the pull, though he was drunk and in a bad mood and not the best looking man in the world and I suspect that had the disco been full of available of women he would have come out, as the joke goes, sucking his thumb. It was still early, but I suppose everyone had been drinking all day in the sunshine and things were only going to get messier. Every minute or so the gang of men started doing a countdown from nine, which might have been some kind of let's do new year in May joke, but it created a tension that something awful was about to happen.
There were no women in town, apart from the two I was with and I could imagine in this lawless part of East Anglia that these gangs of men stick me in a burning Wicker Man whilst they took my womanfolk. My wife said she was glad they were with me and thus safe. I think she overestimates how much protection I can give her.
Luckily the women of Bungay finally came out of their burrows and I saw a few gaggles of short-skirted women start to patrol the high street. The countdown men went out in search of a fuck or a fight. And the tension evaporated.
