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Ernie had birthday balloons yesterday and a clump of them were left just near the bottom of the stairs, including one of the main character from the Lego Movie. Which meant that every time I passed them I thought that there was someone standing in our dining room. Every time. Even seconds after I had just tweeted about the phenomenon. I was being haunted by a balloon.
Is there such a thing as too much RHLSTP? For me, maybe. I hadn’t had time to recover from Thursday in Winchester and today we were off to Exeter. At least I was being driven this time and we were staying over, but I was extremely weary by the time we arrived in this beautiful city. I checked into the hotel and though I had lots of research still to do I considered going to sleep. But what if I slept through my alarm and missed the show? I couldn’t quite nod off.
Eventually I wandered down to the venue, the Corn Exchange. I don’t think I’ve played this venue before and usually Corn Exchanges are ancient buildings where medieval people once exchanged corn for other similar bits of corn. But this one looked like it had been built in the sixties. Perhaps once an ancient building was positioned here and the name has stuck or maybe corn exchange has only recently come to Devon.
I couldn’t get into the venue when I arrived and so went to look for some food and ended up buying myself a yoghurt and a tub of porridge that you make by adding hot water. I wanted to be reasonably healthy and Exeter seemed to be mainly shut. In the end the porridge looked too disgusting to eat, which meant I was not only exhausted during the podcast, but pretty hungry during the second one.
The crew texted me to say they were in Pizza Express, but I still had work to do and so sat in Macdonalds, one of the only places I could find that was open and didn’t order food and tried to find some local stuff to take the mickey out of. Aside from a nearly tragic, but ultimately almost comic suicide bombing in Giraffe (where the terrorist had managed to blow himself up in the toilet by accident, and even then not managed to kill himself, so pretty much failing on every level) there was not too much to find.
Finally I got into the building and my guests, Biblical scholar, Professor Francesca Stavrokopoulou and non-Professor Mike Wozniak arrived. The biggish theatre was almost full and we had chat to do, so we got on with it. For the first week the subject was very much focused on the Bible and God’s cock and for the second week we were more interested in moustaches and psychotic teachers. It was a lot of fun, though required a degree of concentration that left me emotionally and physically spent (and sexually too, but then I really love moustaches).
The guests went to a pub after, but I’d lost reception on my phone and was on my last legs anyway and ended up drinking a tonic water and eating a pack of crisps in the Premier Inn with James, my producer. I cannot claim to be very rock n roll any more. But I never was to be fair. My bed was calling me and I was very happy to slip into its loving embrace.
