Warming Up

Wednesday 8th July 2015

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It was Phoebe’s first time on a plane today and her first trip abroad, as the family flew to Amsterdam where I am gigging for the next four nights. I had anticipated chaos and disaster - after all if we couldn’t even get to a health spa in Tring without major incidents and forgetting we had a baby, then how would be get to Holland? But things ran remarkably smoothly. My daughter seems unphased by anything - she has taken all her injections with barely a tear, loves meeting new people and aside from being a bit grumpy when we took our seats in the plane (mainly I think because she was hungry), none of the rest of it seemed to bother her at all. It’s a good practice flight as it’s only 45 minutes long and they put us at the back of the plane away from almost everyone else, but they needn’t have worried. Apart from doing her first mile-high shit (and kudos to my wife for managing to change that nappy in the smallest aeroplane toilet I have ever seen) there was no incident. We largely avoided her tiny ears popping by feeding her on the way up and the way down. She sat patiently waiting for our luggage to come out of the carousel, staring and smiling at the man sitting next to her, who after smiling back nervously didn’t really know how to cope with this onslaught of friendliness. But Phoebe didn’t care. I don’t think anyone has ever enjoyed international travel more. She couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t as excited as her.

We’ve been put up in a lovely flat very close to the Toomler where I am gigging. But it’s a second or third floor flat with the most ridiculous staircase up to it that I have ever seen (and I have lived in loads of flats in Edinburgh). The gradient makes it closer to a ladder than a staircase and the first flight as you enter the door is comically long. The set designers of Harry Potter would have found it stretched credulity too far. Maybe 60 or 70 narrow steep steps, with a weird curve towards the end. I wasn’t very keen to carry our suitcases up there, let alone our baby. One slip and there was a bumpy toboggan ride to death. 

I carried one of the suitcases and had my ruck sack on my back and by the time I had got them both up the first four or five dozen stairs, terrified of toppling backwards all the time, I didn’t have the strength or wherewithal to get the suitcase round the little even steeper curve at the top. I felt like I was stuck on the side of a mountain with a suitcase, but if I dropped the suitcase it would turn into a bouncing bomb that would destroy my family. Luckily the guy who had driven us here had already got one suitcase round the bend and into the flat and came back and rescued me. It was a bit of a stressful start to the trip.

We went out for a beer and a pizza to calm our nerves, though had to edge our way down the mountain to get there of course and then I headed to the club for the gig. I am going to try and do all different material on these four nights, as well as some new  stuff. The crowd were polite if not vociferous and I remembered too late from the last time that I was here that like the French the Dutch call potatoes “earth apples”. But they were all too nice to say anything. Holly Walsh is doing these gigs as well and was very funny, with particularly impressive use of Venn diagrams. 

I didn’t want to drink too much because I don’t think I would make it back up the stairs to our flat alive if I was drunk. There seemed to be the implication that this was quite a normal state of affairs in Holland, but how many people a year must be killed and injured on these assault courses. Perhaps this is why there are no young or old people in this city as far as I can see. It’s their version of the Pied Piper.