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At last I managed to sleep til 9am! I woke up a couple of times in the night. But this extra hour or so made all the difference. Thank you Jesus. You answered my prayer. I know you’re pretty busy with other stuff, so thanks for taking time out to address this issue that some might see as trivial.
The drive from Newcastle to Edinburgh is one that I have done many times on my way up to the Fringe and which I will be going again at the end of July (having performed in York and the Live Theatre, Newcastle on the way up to Auld Reekie). We did it again today in the cold Spring sunshine and as I saw the blue sea at Berwick-upon-Tweed and then drove past the border sign (soon to be a check point) I felt the usual emotions of elated hope. Given that that hope is nearly always stamped to dust by the end of the Fringe it is remarkable that I still feel the same Pavlov’s dog style excitement. But doing the Fringe is like child birth (that goes on for three and a half weeks). You vaguely remember that it was awful, but you forget the details and for some reason usually want to go through it again.
Even though I wasn’t going to the Fringe, the hope was still in my heart. I am maybe more like Pavlov’s puppy. Doesn’t really matter what the stimulus is, my tail is always wagging and I never learn. But two years away have given me the enthusiasm to return. Come back at the end of August if you want to see the hope dust.
I got the chance to check out this year’s flat, which was only a short walk from the Stand where I am performing tonight. It’s the most expensive flat yet, but it has a parking space and looks nice from the outside, so as long as it has a loo brush I won’t be kicking off. The whole family are coming up and I think this will be a little oasis away from the madness of the Fringe.
I also popped up to the gym. I was wondering if it was worth keeping on my Virgin membership once we move in June, just so I could use the amazing Virgin gym throughout August (to be fair I use it more consistently than the one in London). But I have been away for three years and much has changed. The Virgin gym is now run by Nuffield Health. At least that made my decision about cancelling gym membership much easier. The polite man at reception told me that this had happened last August. I didn’t know if I wanted to pay £15 for a day pass, but I did enquire about a monthly membership in August and consequently was allowed to go into the gym to look around. I looked around by going for a run and a cycle. So that worked out OK just this once.
I then wanted to cut across to the shops to buy some dinner to cook in the lovely Stand flat. As I had done so many times before I used John Lewis as my short cut, only to be greeted with boarded up walls at the opposite entrance. The shopping centre, it transpired, is being knocked down. I step down from being King of this place for two years and the whole city goes to shit.
Always a pleasure to be at the Edinburgh Stand. I have sat in the green room there many times before and I wondered how many more times I will be in there. Unusually I read a book as I waited to go on, rather than continue a pointless battle of Me vs Me pinball. I am reading Homeward Bound, a biography of Paul Simon. It’s an interesting portrait of ambition and the competition of working in a duo, though I feel it might ultimately be a bit harsh on Simon. And occasionally the editorialising and writing gets on my nerves. But I know surprisingly little about one of my favourite musicians. He was at least a big influence on me in my late teens and twenties - though now the posturing and sincerity of Simon and Garfunkel does seem a bit adolescent - which is of course exactly why I liked it at the time. And nothing really wrong with that. It expressed the stuff that I thought I was going through, but crucially there was always a sense of humour and fun to balance up the more embarrassingly portentous moments. And the good stuff is amazingly good.
It made me want to listen to all those albums again and to track down the stuff that I never heard. But reminded me of lots of key stuff in my life.
The show was good. Afterwards I drank whiskey with someone who is training to become a tattooist. People say being a comedian is a tough job, but that is something that I could never do for many reasons (even were I not a cack-handed, unartistic, squeamish idiot). What if you make a mistake? I asked. She admitted it was a big fear, but she was still determined to do it (and her work was going to be about using her skills to help people with skin problems and diseases, so even more impressive). I felt like the people who sit and tell me that they can’t ever imagine doing my job.
I have got to the stage of the tour where I have lost all track of time and the outside world. I was presented with something that seemed to say today was Tuesday, but that didn't seem to compute with anything in my brain, though my brain was unclear what day it was. It took me maybe a minute to accept the truth. But what is true these days? And how do I know it really was Tuesday? You can't prove it.
