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Oh good, got my first Fringe fuck up out of the way nice and early. I thought I had booked three Saturday afternoons for my RHEFPs in a big 350 seater venue to take advantage of weekend traffic. But it turns out I have booked three Friday afternoons in a huge venue…. Thank God, Twitter's Andrew Wood was more on the ball than me or anyone from my management or I might not have spotted this until much later.I guess there might still be a chance to find somewhere else to do it, but suspect I will just have to hope that there are enough people milling around on a Friday to make this work….. It’s just a bit of fun really, so it doesn’t matter if no one comes, but three sold out gigs would help prevent another financial disastrous Fringe!
It was a pretty big day for the Herring family. We got the keys to our new house. There’s work that needs to be done to it so we can’t move in straight away, but the transaction went through on the most expensive thing I have ever bought. Not that I was using my money. The joke was on the bank. I had borrowed all of it from them and there is no way I am going to live long enough to pay it back! Ha ha ha. Free house, banking idiots. As long as I die right now… Shit, my plan may not be waterproof.
We had to wait for a call from the estate agent to let us know we could come and get the keys, but midday passed and then one o clock and I started to worry as we’d arranged to meet some workmen at two. But at last the vendor’s solicitors finished lunch and I got the call. I popped into the estate agent, feeling excited about this significant moment where the keys became mine…. but nothing was running to plan today. The man at the desk did not have the keys listed on his sheet. He looked through some drawers but couldn’t find them. He rang his colleague who had taken possession of the keys last night, but he wasn’t picking up the phone… The minutes were ticking by, but I knew the keys were there somewhere, so I wasn’t too worried. The ineffectual employee flapped around a bit, saying he didn’t know what to do. Should I go to the property and he’d drop the keys round when they turned up? That seemed a bit pointless as we still wouldn’t be able to get in. Might we have bought a house that we couldn’t actually access.
After fifteen minutes of waiting I was getting a bit impatient. “What would you like me to do?†asked the man. “Find my keys,†I said, not entirely unreasonably. It’s the least you can expect when you’ve just bought a property. The man seemed flummoxed. I reasoned with him that he might want to look again. We knew the keys were somewhere in the office. But he said he’d looked everywhere for them. Again I reasoned that he can’t have done. Due to us not having the keys. I was just worried about keeping the people I’d arranged to meet waiting. Well not just that. I was also a bit worried that this incompetent office might have given my keys to someone else who would now be living in my new house.
Just as I thought I was bound to be late the call came through and the keys turned out to be in the office as I had predicted. They were in an envelope with a badly scrawled address written on them. But to be fair, the flummoxed man, who fidgeted so much and seemed so clueless that I thought he might be taking part in a hidden camera show where he’d been asked to take care of a business that he knew nothing about, couldn’t have predicted that the keys would be in an envelope. He handed them over to me without checking my ID even though I’d never met him before. So, my concerns about finding a cuckoo in the nest were not entirely without merit.
We zoomed over to the house, getting there at two minutes to two. Phoebe hadn’t been here before and she ran around the empty rooms with glee. She seemed to like it. Or maybe she just loved the novelty of being in a house without furniture. We have also inherited a cat from the previous owners and Phoebe seemed to like her too.
It’s strange seeing a place you’ve only seen a couple of times before, now empty and realising that you have to live here now. Had we made a terrible mistake? I hope not. I am excited about the move. We’re out in the countryside and we’ve got a little garden. My main fear was that the non-fibre broadband might be awful, because if it was I’d obviously have to burn the house down and move again. But on initial inspection it seemed more reliable than the frankly patchy service we get in London. There are some complications over the gas supply which I spent a fruitless hour attempting and failing to sort out.
But here we are. Our new family home. One we’ve bought as a family. One that will almost certainly be the place that my daughter first remembers living in. What triumphs and disasters will occur inside these walls?
Not too much time to think about it as I had to get over to Radlett for my worst selling gig of the tour. As I looked out at the 60-odd (yes in both ways) people in this 400-seater theatre, I had to worry if I had made the right choice to land myself in huge amounts of debt. But luckily, this year, this kind of gig is the exception, rather than the rule (though coming hard on the heels of another exception from last night it might look like I’ve stretched myself financially at the exact moment that the bottom fell out of my career).
But if I have learned one thing over the years, it is how to perform a show to a small audience in a room that is much too big and whilst making light of the situation I knew that the 60 people who had come were not the ones to blame and I pulled out the stops, whilst acknowledging how weird it all was.
I didn’t know much about Radlett, even though it had briefly been a place that we had considered living in. When I went across the road to the deli to buy a sandwich they told me that they were selling no bread as it was Passover. It turns out that this is the town with the highest proportion of Jewish residents in the UK. So I guess that doing a show on Passover might not have been the cleverest of choices.
Worryingly on the seating plan the first ten or so rows were more or less empty, with everyone having chosen to sit on the raked seating. A chasm of that size between me and a tiny audience would be disastrous for a comedy gig. The duty manager thought it was unlikely that she’d be able to persuade people to come forwards and I had visions of myself spending the first ten minutes cajoling and threatening the crowd to move - I thought I might even go down into the auditorium in order to make the back row the front row and show people that not being at the front would actually make them more likely to be picked on. But bless them, the Radlettians pretty much all came to the front and the gig became playable.
It had been a tough and stressful day, but I forgot about all that and was playful and silly and came up with a few new bits.
These two days had been the ones that I had been dreading, but both the gigs were good ones. I got through it. As I got through the whole thing with the keys and will get through the Friday podcasts and changing my gas supply and the whole terrible, terrible error of leaving behind the city for life in the countryside.
I can’t complain.
But that won’t stop me.
