I was sick and tired of everything, when I blogged you last night from Glasgow (and I do feel the pain of Benny and/or Bjorn from Abba who must have been befuddled and terrified in the city in the 1970s- though at least they got a song out of it).
I felt a bit better today and think a lot of the problems yesterday had been down to lack of sleep. With a bit more of a lie in I felt almost human again, though suspected that the next two days might still manage to knock the stuffing out of me. And the driving Gods who've been dicking me around with snow and road closures certainly had some more fun in store for me.
I had decided to book a hotel in Perth, two hours away from Aberdeen, which would mean I could make some headway on the six to seven hour drive to Liverpool. I stopped off on the way there to pick up my key and drop off my stuff and was a bit concerned as my window was right next to some kind of extractor fan or air conditioning unit which was rattling away at about the noise level of a truck engine or a taxiing aircraft. I went down to reception to suggest that they move me, but they told me that the unit was only active when people were working in the kitchen. I told her that I would be getting in late and wouldn't want to be woken up as they started making breakfast at 7. She said it would be quiet until 9 and that she'd ask them to keep it turned off for longer. I was dubious that this would happen and annoyed as I had chosen this country hotel mainly because I assumed it would be quiet, but I am not one to make a fuss. Not at the time. Not when I can just bitch about it later on my blog.
I was soon on the road to Aberdeen, a mysterious fog drifting across the road the further I got, helping to shroud the many speed cameras and mobile speed camera units that were dotted along my path. I worried about the fog still being there on my return, but there was nothing I could do about it. I wondered if like Glenn Miller I might disappear after my gig and never be seen again.
I was tired enough when I got to the venue to try to sleep lying on the dressing room floor and I almost drifted off, but too soon it was show time. I started with a lot of energy, but felt I lost the audience's focus a bit towards the middle of the first half, partly because there were people at the back who were chatting at a volume that wasn't quite loud enough to constitute heckling, but loud enough to be distracting. It's hard to break off from a story to deal with something like this - it breaks the flow and looks too aggressive to the vast majority of the audience who won't have heard the interruption and every time one of the people tried to engage and shout something out they mistimed it so that I was talking and also did so half-heartedly. It was annoying. I'd rather people didn't heckle to be honest, but if they are going to then at least do so in a confident manner. A timid heckler is the worst of all worlds. Should I break the flow in order to ask them to be quiet or just ignore them and press on? I did the latter, which was probably the better course of action, but my timing was thrown off and I felt, rightly or wrongly that the audience had lost their focus and maybe were judging me for letting this go. It wasn't constant, which would have made the decision easier and the opportunity did not present itself to do anything about it. Very frustrating.
But at the beginning of the second half when I was just easing people back into it, I did get a chance to address it, letting my tired frustration out, in a mainly amusing way (though edging towards being a bit too harsh). Even now the woman heckling seemed to be doing it at the wrong time, like when you're trying to have a conversation and you both speak at the same time. But the issue was addressed and after a long five minutes of trying and failing to be amusing the lady did finally shut up, or fall into a drunken stupor. I've lost all track of what day it is and it was only later that I twigged that it was a Saturday. The curse of boozed up Britain!
But thankfully the rest of the show ticked along nicely and most of the others seemed to enjoy it. I was soon heading off into the even thicker and spookier fog, which may have had mysterious mind-bending properties because it actually made me feel nauseous. The concentration required for the next 135 minutes was rather intense - luckily the roads were quite quiet and not too windy, but I lived in fear of veering off the highway and over a Scotch cliff. The regularity with which the night time drives have proved troublesome have been so consistent that were I a more superstitious man I would assume some cosmic power was dicking with me.
I got back to the hotel at about 12.30, quite fancying a drink - I'd been given a free drink voucher at check in - but maybe they'd heard me coming and were fearful of me cashing it in, because the bar was locked up and there was no member of staff around. Perhaps it had been Twilight Zone fog and I had entered an alternate reality where all the people had vanished (and then it turned out that it was me in fact who was dead or a devil or an angel or an alien - it's always one of those). But then some guests from a wedding that had been going on somewhere in the hotel stumbled past on their way to their rooms. But maybe they were dead or devils or angels or aliens too. They reminded me with a start that I will be getting married myself in a fortnight - my brain really isn't able to process that information at the moment. I couldn't find a drink so went up to my bedroom, relieved to find that the extractor fan was not blasting out its hot air and having some hot chocolate and shortbread instead.
I still felt a lot better than I had yesterday, even if the rigours of touring are probably hitting me physically and mentally at the moment. At least Twitter was on hand to let me know that Charley Boorman was on TV - it's a service that dozens of people provide for me on there. A lot of people would pay to have that kind of info, but I get it for free. I am the luckiest man in the world.
