I arrived in a cold and snowy Rhyl at around about 2.30pm - my fears of getting stranded here were growing by the minute. In winter this seaside resort seems desolate and unwelcoming. I have a feeling it might be like that in the summer too.
I checked in to my hotel, which had carpet like my gran's lounge in Middlesbrough in the 1970s (and Middlesbrough was about 20 years behind the rest of the world then) and went out to have a look round the town. A cold wind was blowing through the damp streets and there was not too much there to entertain me. With the snow falling and the possibility of being trapped here I couldn't help thinking of Groundhog Day. I wondered that if I had to relive the same day over and over again here if I might eventually think this 1970s town might feel like a place I wanted to live. For the moment I was just hoping to find a coffee shop, but on looking on my iPhone map I discovered the nearest Starbucks was several miles away in another town. Which might be a reason to love Rhyl after all. But not when I was cold and tired and needed a reliable latte.
I bought some chips from a fish and chip shop where the men behind the counter were clearly caught on the hop by this afternoon customer. They had to throw away the remaining lunchtime chips and cook me up a whole batch especially. They were rather good ones too. But this was not a good sign for a healthy tour, given that the only other lunch I had had was a pack of mini eggs.
I had sold around about 100 tickets for tonight's show in a 1000 seater theatre. In some ways I was pleased to get that many, as like most seaside towns I seem to play, the place seemed to populated only by the very young and the very old.
I wasn't as tired or grouchy as yesterday and there was at least a couple of bottles of water and a kettle in my dressing room (which makes me think that every theatre in the land is reading this blog and quaking in their boots about what diva-ish behaviour they might get when I show up), but there was no food. I was still fairly full from my chips and there hadn't been anything resembling a shop or cafe in the half a mile walk up from my hotel - only a derelict hotel with holes in its roof from what had clearly been an impressive fire, though eerily the net curtains still hung in the windows.
And the loyal people who showed up all sat near enough the front (apart from 3 or 4 who insisted on going up to the balcony) for the laughter to resonate. They could have had ten seats each and maybe it would have been funny if they had all spaced themselves out in that way. There was a bit of a gap because an orchestra pit was in front of the stage, but I managed to engage with them and didn't get weary, although might have been a little light-headed from hunger near the end. We has some fun with anti-English xenophobia and anti-Welsh responses. But it was all banter Martin, harmless banter.
I headed off into the swirling snow after the show, with my collection buckets and my pink moustache bucket covered in swastikas. No one was around to see me or mug me or congratulate me for being a Nazi. It wasn't even 10 o clock yet and I knew the hotel bar would be open so was going to reward myself with a pint of Guinness. In a fit of madness I had bought 300 posh tea bags over the internet a couple of months ago, thinking I would have a nice cup of ginger tea instead of beer, but so far I've had 3 beers and no teas on this leg of the tour.
The hotel bar was unexpectedly packed to the rafters and loud music was blaring out. A black haired female singer had some kind of karaoke style machine and a microphone with a nice echo effect and was belting out some folk songs, whilst what looked like a whole coachload of pensioners were watching her, rapt and swaying.
I ordered some stout (my unhealthy dinner would be two pints of Guinness and a packet of crisps - is that the Irish version of that execrable sit-com?) and sat in a room behind the main bar, where four pensioners were playing pontoon. I still had my buckets with me and thought that the clientele of this bar were the ones most likely to be affronted by my Nazi moustache and swastika receptacle. It would be an irony indeed if I was beaten to death by an army of sixty and seventy year olds.
It was a sharp contrast to the last two lonely nights in bars that were closed or which I was the only patron and somewhat surreal, like a scene from a film. The singer switched from folk to rock and gave a bravado performance of "Rockin' All Over The World". The pensioners sang along with the chorus. It was awesome. No wonder I had such a small crowd with this kind of competition in town.
The card playing foursome were having a lot of fun. One of them women was glamorous despite her advancing years and looked quite a lot like Wendy Craig. She was a little bit frisky and made a joke at one point about swapping keys between the couples and giving each other a good time. She laughed bawdily but then added, "No we can't really. He's not well enough." But I liked the fact that they were laughing in the face of their old age and looking back with nostalgia on a time when a trip to a hotel would have meant a bit more fun than pontoon and "Hi-Ho Silver Lining". Though for a second I wondered if that was actually more fun that the pursuit of physical pleasure. To be released entirely from libido and to look back on it as if it were a hit record from the 1970s might be a preferable place to be. I know I am getting close to feeling like that and I am only 42.
I realised how easy it actually is for Alan Bennett and for Caroline Aherne and Peter Kay for that matter. Just sit in a bar like this, writing down what everyone says and there you go. More money in the bank.
An old fella on the next table over said,"If I am hungry I eat. I eat two or three times a day."
His lady companion replied resignedly, "I suppose I would if I was hungry. But I am never hungry."
Maybe Beckett wrote his plays in Rhyl as well.
"I know what I've got in mind," said the woman who was never hungry, "Some malted oat biscuits and a Mars Bar."
If you're reading Peter Kay you can have that.
The singer kept sounding like every song would be the last, but she didn't want to leave the stage and this massive crowd and kept doing one more encore. She perhaps feared the inevitable comedown and she didn't want to be like me, the strange man with the pink bucket and the unfashionable moustache drinking Guinness on his own. For the moment she was in the spotlight and the star and her humdrum life could wait. She said she would finish with her favourite song. "It's by Eva Cassidy and it's called Songbird. Do you know it?" The response was somewhat underwhelming for this show closer. "Ah well," she said and just pressed onwards.
Except she was having trouble locating it on her machine. "Where is it?" she asked, "Just gotta scroll through to the S's." There was a long pause, "I can't see it. I need my glasses." Even the entertainer was a monument to human frailty. That thought got more response than Eva Cassidy's name. What's the point in being an entertainer, when people needing spectacles has more resonance with the public?
She sang and soon the entertainment was over. It was about 11 o clock now and everyone milled out of the bar and went to bed. I stayed and finished my stout, enjoying the fact that my strange life had brought me to this unusual place where I didn't belong and where, if anyone else there knew what a computer, I might have been the subject of a few confused blogs.
Perhaps I should have tried to grab myself a granny, but like them I was actually more looking forward to getting some sleep.
The image of this old folk rocking all over the world will stick with me. It's great to have a new context to a song, as I found out with
Dancing in the Moonlight. It's a wonderful mixture of triumph and tragedy. It is life.
It's making a joke about swapping partners when you know you're actually all too fucked to fuck.
I love life. I hope I get old before I die.
