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I played the Albert Hall tonight. Alas when I got there I found there must have been a double booking as some chancer called Dave Gilmour had snuck into the main room, so I was on in the Elgar Rooms which is not quite the capacity of the Hall itself. But maybe that was lucky as only a hundred or so people had shown up to see me Lloyd Griffith and Alun Cochrane do our stuff. I am MCing a few of these late Friday night gigs over the next couple of months and was hoping to use them to test out new material for the tour, but I only get 10 mins at the start and 5 minutes in the second half and my job is really to get the audience facing the right way and in the mood to start laughing. I am not sure a 10 minute routine about my wife giving birth was the right way to start. So I did old stuff instead and then chatted with a Dutch couple who had somehow chanced across this gig on a 3 might trip to London. I asked them what the procession of oldie time horse carriages had been about on my last trip there and they had no idea what I was talking about, suggesting that a) they were just pretending to be Dutch for a spree of some kind or b) what I saw was a parade of Dutch ghosts out to celebrate my birthday. Though thinking about it it was on the eve of my birthday which is Orangeman’s Day so it might be something to do with that. No. It’s ghosts. Definitely.
Also there were those ghost mice in Amsterdam too. I can see dead people and vermin, but only in lowland countries.
I’ve been decluttering the house in preparation for our move and also to make our place look more attractive to unimaginative potential buyers who are incapable of understanding that they will only get our house and not the stuff in it I took a big bin bag of broken and old electrical items to the library (they offer a recycling service, I am not insane) and I also had a big bin bag of books that we no longer want. I was going to take the books to the charity shop, but then it struck me that I was in a library and they like books there, so maybe they’d like a free bag of books. But they declined them. Which is good (ish) news for the Fara charity shop which might make upwards of four pounds from selling on the Guinness Book of Records 2004 (which I bought when I planned to try and learn the whole thing as one of the tasks in my 12 Tasks of Hercules Terrace) and 20th Century printed dictionaries and other shit books that we have no use for. Maybe it would be an organisational nightmare and maybe they would end up with loads of books that they didn’t want, but it seems odd that you can’t give books to a library. When the man said no I wished that I had a bin-liner full of the rarest books in the world, like the first Koran and a first folio Shakespeare and a lost Magna Carta which I would then show him and make him rue his sniffiness. But as mainly had stuff like a 1999 guide to New York City (can’t wait to see this World Trade Centre they were going on about) then he actually made the right choice.
In a sense though it’s ludicrous hanging on to any books once you’ve read them. There are very few that you go back to and I sometimes wished that we emulated the Aborigines more with possessions. But I held on to far more books that I will never read than I gave away today.
But after 12 years and some serious hoarding it’s good to start getting rid of some of the detritus of my life and it will be interesting to see what survives the move and what ends up in charity shops or recycling bins or just left on the pavement outside my house in the hope that some other Shepherd’s Bush resident has some use for it. Today unknown people took two falling apart bedside cabinets, a posh box that some wine was delivered in, an ancient abdomiser and a flipchart stand. They have so far left behind two rather decent flat pack bookcases, but probably only because it would take more than one person to carry them. I hope someone takes a fancy to them: I am so used to stuff just being taken straight away that I don’t even know where the dump it.
And talking of streaming: I have put a few more items up on eBay, including one of the 12 shows T shirts that went unclaimed.
All the money from this will go towards funding future internet projects.
Another of those T shirts has gone (along with an original TGP script, a signed copy of Bye Bye Balham and some signed programmes and leaflets) to this month’s monthly subscriber monthly draw, Pete Phillips. This kind of wondrous bounty could be yours. Just donate a pound or more a month here and get one entry per month per pound, plus access to a secret channel of extras and more.
And frame 65 of Me1 vs Me2 snooker is now up in the usual places. It's rather an exciting one as I recall.
