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Driving home from Bishops Stortford tonight I ran over a couple of families of ghosts. It might have been clumps of fog, but more likely ghost families.
Welsh Ray had prior commitments this weekend so I am doing three gigs on my own, which is tougher than I remembered. Even though Bishops Stortford isn’t too far from home (as the crow flies) it took me about an hour each way to drive there. And I am sure it was tiredness that caused me to kill those ghosts. But the joke’s on me because now they will come back as super-ghosts with the power to haunt me wherever they like. I am a fool.
The show was a good one, and I pretty successfully managed to whip up some North versus East Hertfordshire rivalry, as well as mocking the Bishops Stortfordians for essentially living in Essex and being the kind of border scum that proper Hertfordshire residents like me have nothing but disdain for. I am smashing it with the Herts local knowledge.
In the day time I’d mooched around Hitchin trying to find a good place to sit and write emergency questions. Hitchin is always heaving on a Friday and I ended up in a cafe away from the High Street. A man came in for his lunch and took some time perusing the menu before opting for a jacket potato with beans and cheese, ordering in a monotone John Majors voice (which I assume was the one he uses all the time). It made it sound like the most boring meal in the world, somehow even more boring than just beans on their own. Somehow it felt like this was this guy’s big moment - his one time in the month to go and eat out and he had chosen a meal that he could easily cook at home. I am not really knocking him. I’ve ordered meals as dull as this one, but somehow there was some relish hidden beneath the monotone that made this one of the most tragic and human moments I’ve seen.
I sat in another cafe contemplating how much of our precious time we fritter away on doing nothing and as I ate my own equally dull meal choice of a plasticy croque monsieur (even sadder than the potato really, because it’s just a ham and cheese sandwich that you’re trying to big up with a French name) I thought about why we don’t grab every moment of our lives and make them the best that we could possibly have. We were all going to be gone in 100 years, replaced (hopefully) by an almost entirely new cast of characters. Maybe we’d stare at them out of a photograph and they’d think how strange and dull we were. For this moment I was in their shoes, feeling how strange and dull the world around me was, and that I was too.
I wrote a few quite philosophical emergency questions in this moment of existential dread. Plus some ones about bums, I expect.
