Less than a week in and the tour is taking its toll, even though I have taken it easy on the boozing and carousing. I am tired and have a slightly dicky tummy and there are still over 30 gigs to go. There is a part of me that thinks this is a young man's game. But then there is a part of me still convinced that I am a young man, so I just have to let that side of my personality come to the fore and I should get through it.
And mostly I am enjoying it, despite the post gig come-downs. I still love the freedom of driving round the country and the gigs are all going very well.
Tonight's show at the Midland Arts Centre in Birmingham was sold out, which was gratifying after a couple of quieter nights. I arrived at the venue quite early and had some time to kill. I sat outside in the little courtyard and drank a coffee and watched the clientele of these excellent Arts Centre passing by.
Some young children were playing a basic game of tag around a tree. A little lad of three or four was bombing around in a circle, with what seemed like an infinite supply of energy. Given my own flagging reserves I was very jealous, but also fascinated to see someone so small managing to run so fast and so relentlessly and without tiring or getting out of breath. Human beings are quite amazing and these tiny new ones are maybe the most impressive of all. It was fun to watch the people, before the people would come to watch me.
It was another good gig and the old people are going from strength to strength, revealing to the Birmingham people that I was ill and that on the drive from Bolton I had done a fart that had turned out to be a little bit more than a fart. It's not the kind of thing I would want made public knowledge, but those oldsters laid into me and humiliated me.
Afterwards I chatted with some of the punters in the bar, before having to accept the horrible moment where I returned to my hotel. I was staying at The Paragon hotel, which apparently used to be an orphanage, so was much more like the Shining than the other place. It was clearly once an impressive building, with a plaque saying that the first stone had been laid by some obscure Princess of Schleswig-Holstein in 1903.
But it had seen better days and was just as depressing a place to spend a Saturday night as a more modern purpose built hotel. Lots of excited young men were sitting near the lift, drinking. A party of respectable, mainly middle-aged Asian women, dressed as if they had just come from a wedding or something similar were waiting to go upstairs. The lads started trying to get their attention, telling them they were beautiful in a leery and slightly unpleasant way. It could have been a lot worse, but it visibly made everyone uncomfortable and was unnecessarily disrespectful and slightly shameful. I could have stepped in and said, "Hey, you young fellows. Please have some manners and leave these ladies alone."
But I value my face and testicles and so let it pass and hid in the lift, pleased to be heading back to my room which would once have housed maybe ten or twenty orphans, stacked up on top of each other. I hoped I wouldn't encounter any ghosts in the corridor. I didn't. Though I had more to fear from the living than the dead.
