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We’d driven towards Stafford after the gig last night so that we could stay two nights in the same hotel. Usually this affords a little tour luxury and stability - no need to get up early and a day to potter around and do some work. But we’d ended up in a Holiday Inn on the edge of Cannock, a good couple of miles away from any proper shops of cafes, on a bit of an industrial estate.
I had woken up stupidly early, as usual (6.20am)l, but thought I had to wait in for a radio interview (it was only at 10.10 that I discovered that that’s actually tomorrow). So after that had failed to happen I decided to go for a run and see if I could find some civilisation. I didn’t manage to do that, but I did make it to Cannock town centre where I stopped off for a coffee. I was a bit self conscious because I was in tight lycra leggings (I hadn’t anticipated that I would be in polite company) and I didn’t have my computer with me so I couldn’t get on with work. So I just sat in a Costa in Cannock, having trouble working out where I was both physically and metaphysically. It was a strange limbo day and I felt like an inappropriately dressed ghost. Was I even here? I was tired and confused which gave the day a David Lynch feel, made stronger by the fact that three teenage girl sea cadets were in front of me in the queue in uniform. How had I found myself in Cannock? Where was Cannock? What if this was the actual limbo, as me and the people around me waited to find out if they were going to go to Heaven or Hell? I mean, I suppose we were waiting for that anyway wherever we were, but for some reason Cannock felt like a place where you passed time whilst waiting for the afterlife to kick in.
With a long day stretching ahead of me and not much to do I had time to miss my family and get a bit of a mid-tour slump. Not that I have anything to be depressed about as things are going very well, but it’s tough being away. Luckily this is the last major jaunt away from my girls, as I will get home from most gigs after this bit is over.
I walked round some shops and bought some lunch and walked back to the hotel. I’d hoped to start work on AIOTM and had some ideas swirling round my brain, but I wasn’t getting them down on paper, so I watched the Simon Pegg film “Man Up” which was a bit strange and disjointed and relied on the characters in it making a series of unbelievable decisions. I wanted to like it, but it didn’t really gel for me.
Finally we headed for Stafford and a sold out gig (in a small room). I was back in the infamous dressing room where the lights are operated by a sensor, but if you’re on the loo there is no way of activating it when it goes off (apart from getting up and shuffling back into the dressing room and waving) so you end up sitting there in the dark. Which is fine. But annoying. Make your own joke about motion sensors.
When I got back to the hotel I completed my disappointing Simon Pegg film marathon by watching “Absolutely Anything”, which has an amazing cast, but a very disappointing sub-Monty Python script (Terry Jones is one of the writers and the other living members play some unfunny aliens). Simon Pegg does his best to breathe some life into it, but it’s a bit of a mess.
