So it continues. A much less stressful day today - the drive to Leeds was easy, the hotel was located readily, it had a car park underneath it and I got a cab to the venue. Evenso I was much too tired to do more than a few minutes of work and was forced to have a nap in the afternoon. But every day down is a day closer to home and my own bed.
I haven't dared looked forwards to what's coming up next week. Just got to get these last few out of the way. Sales continue to be good. There might be a few tickets left for Cardiff and Oxford, but they are going to be sell outs, as was tonight. King's Lynn on Saturday should bring me back down to earth with a bump though. I have sold an impressively tiny 11% of the tickets for that one. So I think you should get away with turning up on the night.
It's hard to blog about a tour without getting repetitive, because on a run like this it is just the same thing happening every day, except I am getting more tired as time passes. Tonight's gig didn't seem to take off as much as usual in the first half and I mentioned on Twitter that the audience seemed reticent. I came down for a beer in the break and two or three people commented on the tweet and expressed surprise that I had dissed them. Which was an interesting new step in audience performer interaction. The second half got a much better response, so maybe everyone was on Twitter and they decided to pull their socks up.
I went out for a curry with Toby the promoter after the gig. The restaurant was empty apart from the two of us, but it was a really good meal. On the Lee and Herring tours we seemingly went for a post gig curry every single night - despite having eaten sandwiches before the gig. How it has taken Stewart Lee so long to get fat I have no idea!
It was a nice change to go for a meal tonight and Toby is a good lad and a York City fan (we're going to go and see them play at Wembley in May - they've reached a cup final, even though they are on the brink of further ignominious relegation). We sat chatting about comedy and our jobs. I am nothing if not a hypocrite. But I was glad to be away from the hotel bar and the businessmen talking about their jobs.
The only other thing of interest (if you stretch the definition of that word some distance) is that for the third time this week I had the Guardian newspaper delivered to my room at different hotels and for the third time they charged me just 80p for it. The Guardian had been 90p for a few weeks now. Yet these three hotels do not seem to have noticed the increase. Which leaves me in a moral quandary. Should I have told the receptionist that she (like the others) had got the price wrong and proffered another 10p or should I keep my mouth shut and just steal one ninth of the paper from under the noses of the fat cat hotel owners? After all they are charging me a lot of money to stay in their room and often even more money to park in their car park. Is this a victory for the little man or a pathetic petty theft? I know my dad would have owned up and given them the correct amount, but so far I have kept schtum and made a cool 30 pence in the process. And I don't have to just think of myself. If I tell the receptionist the truth then all the other Guardian readers will be punished for my honesty and be left out of pocket. It's a tough one. The fact it's happened three times running makes me wonder if the Guardian actually has some kind of promotion at hotels where the paper is cheaper, so maybe my apparent victory is no kind of victory at all. But in hotels where they are charging £4 for a bottle of beer and £3.95 for a bottle of mineral water, who is the real criminal? And providing I am paying them the amount they are asking for, is the fault not with them? Or does my knowledge of the true price make me culpable?
Such massive ethical dilemmas dominate my time now. The 30p of fat cat money is burning a hole in my pocket. Even though the hotel fat cats would just spend it on child pornography (another email from the lawyers coming through I sense). It wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't stealing part of such a liberal newspaper. Would it be all right if I just didn't read the sports section?
I'll give the 30p to SCOPE. But I am not going to tell the next receptionist of their error. For the sake of others. I am like Robin Hood - stealing a ninth of the price of a paper for the rich and giving a ninth of the price of a paper to the small proportion of well off, though not quite as wealthy liberals who read the same paper as me.
Take that Thatcher!
