I woke up and turned over to hug my fiancee, but the bed beside me was empty. I was momentarily confused, wondering if perhaps she'd gone to sleep in the other room because I'd been snoring (not that that has ever happened before, of course, but there's a first time for everything). I nearly called out to her. But then I realised I was in the Premier Inn outside of Shrewsbury and was alone. And so my day started with a mini echo of heartbreak.
But I got over it.
I have been staying in a lot of Premier Inn rooms this tour, partly because I do whatever Lenny Henry tells me (which has got me into some embarrassing situations in the past) but mainly because they are reliable comfortable and not too expensive and so far there has never been any snot of the shower curtain. There's not much character, but there's usually free parking and you know how important that is to me. There are sometimes ghosts in the car park too, which adds some frisson.
Also there is another constant (and I believe someone on Twitter drew my attention to this, but I forget who it was) which is every room seems to have the exact same picture on the wall. I seem to recall getting obsessed with the art in another hotel chain on the last tour. But once you notice these things it's hard to unnotice them.
The picture is quite unusual. It looks like it's painted at the time of a sunset and depicts three balls on the end of poles seemingly reflected in some water and a fourth ball on a pole with no reflection (possibly because it's on the wrong side of the pool. I have no idea what the balls are meant to represent. Three setting suns? Then why the poles? Moons on sticks? Why so many? And why is the fourth one in a different place to the others. It makes me think of being in a holiday resort with a swimming pool by the beach, but for some reason someone has erected some giant lollipops along the beach. I guess it's quite a good piece of art because it's really made me think about what it's meant to be and has conjured up a few weird possibilities, but I'd love to know what the fuck it is meant to be. I don't stay in the Premier Inn to have my mind (or in these boring days of middle age anything else) blown. I stay here to sleep before driving off on the ridiculously circuitous route that all tours are traditionally forced to go on. I hope the person who painted this strange crepescular planetary dreamscape gets well paid for having so any copies of their vision reproduced. There must be hundreds of thousands if not millions of these things out there. What does it mean?
I had too much to do to think anymore about it. I needed to write my Metro article for next week and then drive to Bridgend in Wales. Every tour has a stupid little run in it which is psychologically difficult. This is (hopefully) the stupidest part of this tour. Shrewsbury followed by Bridgend followed by a six hour drive to Whitehaven in Cumbria. The fact that I would have to pass Shrewsbury on the way back up to the North West corner of England would add to the feelings of discomfort. To break the journey up a little I had booked a Travelodge near to Birmingham so that I could get a third of the journey done after tonight's gig. And thus avoid staying in Bridgend, which is close enough to Swansea to make me fear that any hotel room would have the toilet in the same room as the bed.
The psychological difficulty of the ludicrously long journeys was made worse by the fact that Bridgend and Whitehaven are two of the lowest selling gigs of the tour. It felt like a long way to travel to entertain less than 200 people. I wasn't particularly looking forward to tonight's gig which was in a tiny 80 seater room (having been moved from the not exactly enormous 130 seater main room due to lack of demand).
But it turned out to be a really enjoyable night and the audience were packed in to the venue and immediately up for comedy. I'd got a good welcome from the crew too who had provided a dinner of local cheese and ham and crusty bread and butter for a make your own sandwich. There was no plate or cutlery, but I liked the DIY aspect of it and that prevented me from having too many fats smeared on my sandwich. I had my own toilet, though it was up a flight of stairs, through a dark room, where they'd set up some desk lamps to guide me through to a bathroom with no door on it (don't question it, it's the South Wales way- don't judge other cultures). But I felt welcome and wanted and everyone was very concerned with me being happy and I'd rather play this tiny room to 80 people than some of the impersonal bigger venues I've been to.
I couldn't hang around afterwards, but felt I had 90 minutes of driving in me, so was a bit perturbed when my new TomTom told me that part of my route was closed and the alternate route would take two and a half hours. It made no sense. I'd seen no indication on the way down that the M5 would be closed and surely any rerouting wouldn't take an hour even if I had to go down country roads. I couldn't face the dark country route through Wales and after asking my fiancee to check the internet I decided I would ignore the machines that are trying to control my life. If it was right then I would rather be on the M5 and find a different hotel, but I was pretty sure it was wrong. I just couldn't face an 150 minute drive and knew it might be difficult to find somewhere to stay on the alternate route.
As it turned out the Tomtom was dead wrong. Though it kept trying to reroute me, even once I had got on to the long stretch of the M5 that it claimed was closed (the south bound carriageway had some closures). The technology of a sat nav is amazing, but this error could have massively impacted on my night. I got to my sparse Travelodge room without the delays that the space future tech had predicted.
The room had no spooky or confusing pictures to haunt me. I opened a couple of beers on a shelf, watched an episode of House and then went to sleep. I didn't check the shower curtain.
Some extra tour gigs have been added - I will be doing a second night at
the Norwich Playhouse on the 19th April and two more London dates have been added at the Bloomsbury on
15th and 16th May. The DVD will be recorded on 30th March at the Bloomsbury and there are
a handful of tickets left for that date and the 31st March 
