I think a bit too much is being expected of me at the moment. The drive from Glasgow to Cambridge is, according to my faithful sat nav, 380 miles. I had decided that I would try and do half of that today, find a hotel and do some work.
About 80 miles in I stopped at a service station, paid for 24 hours of internet access and wrote Warming Up and an article for the Observer about my belly. That had to be in by tomorrow. I decided to get it out of the way first. But I stayed at the services for two hours, so it was time to move on.
It was lunchtime by now and I hadn't had breakfast so I bought a pastie and some crisps and ate them in the car. It is depressing how much weight I have put on in the last two months, especially after all the exertions to lose weight in the previous five months. But at least that made for an interesting article for the Observer. In which I had mentioned pasties, which was the impetus to make me buy a pastie.
I drove on.
400 miles is a fuck of a long way. It's almost half as far as the Proclaimers would walk to impress their girlfriends. Admittedly I wasn't walking. And I was doing it for myself. And I doubt Peter Kay would ever do a charity single based on my journey, but still. I was glad I wasn't doing Cambridge tonight. In what, no doubt, was an accidental piece of good judgement by the team who put this tour together.
It did at least make up my mind that I would be flying to Inverness and also flying back from Aberdeen. So at the next service station another 80 miles down the road I booked up my flights. The Inverness one controversially doesn't leave London until 4pm and gets in at quarter to six. If anything goes wrong then I will be in trouble. But I felt like taking a gamble. And I seemed to have no choice as only one flight was going to the airport from London that day as far as I could ascertain.
I received an email from Nathan Davies who told me that a journalist who had interviewed me for the Inverness gig, a certain Colin Campbell has quoted me as saying that, "I joke about child killers and the end of the world. These are serious subjects that aren't funny in themselves but I think we can use humour to investigate our reactions to the issues." I am sure I said this, but only very vaguely remember the interview amongst the many I have done over the last few weeks. I had a sense that the man was a curmudgeon who was tricking me - I think he asked me to say what kind of things I joked about and I had said that I wasn't keen to say, as there is a difference between saying stuff in a show and putting things in the newspaper. But evenso, he has apparently dubbed me an "anarchic" comedian and he is sickened that I will be visiting his town. Even though he has no idea what I am going to say. The cunt. Well Colin Campbell, probably most of the show will now be devoted to taking the piss out of you, you piece of shitty scum. So I hope you come along. And thanks for generating some much needed publicity for my appearance. (ADDENDUM - I may have to apologise for this rant as the version of the article I have seen is in fact very positive and has none of the stuff that Nathan claims in it, in which case Colin Campbell, far from being a cunt, is a very nice man and I am a cunt and Nathan is as well, but there will be news on developments tomorrow)
I decided that I wasn't going to get much else done today in terms of writing and so when I hit the half way point and found myself near Stoke, I decided to press onwards. Part of me was considering going all the way back home, just so I got one night in my bed. But that was still along way away and would just mean more driving in the morning. So I elected to get three quarters of the way and find somewhere nice-ish to stay and at my third service station booked a hotel room in Stratford upon Avon. Maybe I'd do some work in the evening. Or maybe I would chill out, try to get some stuff done in the morning, then do the shorter drive to Cambridge and try and finish my script in the afternoon.
It was a plan. If I could at least write Warming Up after a Thai meal over the road from the hotel and a couple of beers in the bar, then I would be ahead of the game. Then perhaps I could play some internet poker and have some time off for a fucking change.
So it's 9.45pm on Thursday and I am indeed in the hotel bar, full of spicy pork, feeling old and tired and fat, but at least one step ahead of the game as far as it goes for tomorrow. I hope nothing brilliant happens in the next two hours or you'll never find out about it, but to be honest, looking around I find it pretty unlikely that it will. Unless the clashing patterned carpet and seat covers
manage to warp my mind and send me on an acid-like trip to another dimension.
But I think it's more likely that I'll have a couple of beers, play a bit of poker, maybe finish Andrew Collings's book and then go up to bed to make my own amusement.
This is a day in my life. I feel I have worked hard, even though the only actual bit of graft I have done is one newspaper article. But anyone who told you show business would be glamorous underestimated things by a huge margin. Night night.
