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The fire engines were back in my village for the second time in four days (I don’t recall seeing one stop here in the previous two years) and it was for the exciting reason that the field where I gather my stone was on fire. I assume they were burning the crops, but things got a bit out of hand and the fire engulfed the back fences of the houses backing on to it.
It wasn’t my fault. Although I have occasionally caused sparks when chucking flint on to flint from a distance, I hadn’t been up there since last week. If anything had I done a better job of creating a wall betwixt field and properties I might actually have stopped this happening.
With the news of a fire reaching me via social media and my sense of smell (the original social media) I decided to pop up to the field to walk the dog, see what was going on and record a podcast.
I was surprised to see a fire engine actually on the field, though at this stage had no idea that it was more than a few bits of hedge that had gone up, but I was also delighted to see that a swathe across the field had been ploughed (as it turned out in an attempt to keep the flames from the edge) and a whole new crop of impressive stones had been revealed. I was probably more excited about the stones than I was about the fire engine.
Alas I missed the first 20 minutes of the recording and so you won’t get to hear me discovering that the stone santa has been (or ftone fanta - he invented the fizzy drink too) as I turned off the recording when I took a photo of the fire engine and then somehow deleted what I had done before that.
But luckily I realised and there’s still a good 30 minutes of reaction to enjoy, including me discovering how bad the damage had been and basically laughing at my fellow villagers’ bad luck (though they were taking it well).
I never expected Stone Clearing to turn into something so exciting, or to become a news reporter on the scene of a conflagration, but this is definitely still the most exciting episode of an stone clearing-based podcast in the world
Anyway I don’t know if I can bear the excitement - the podcast starts with me noticing a wisp of smoke coming from my side of the field and the firemen noticing it and driving over to put out the smouldering embers. It’s like a gritty US reboot of the podcast. Hopefully it will be like this every week from now on.
Fern Brady has been announced as the second guest at what promises to be an awesome
Glasgow RHLSTP in November, with Limmy as the other guest. Already about 800 tickets sold for this one, so don’t leave it too late.
I am furiously trying to book guests for the rest of the tour, especially the September dates. Brighton and Richmond are selling a little slower than expected, but hoping to be able to get some big names for these. Bristol and Winchester are sold out, as is the first Newcastle show and many others are heading that way. I can make no sense of why some gigs are not selling as well, but I’ve already outsold my last stand up tour, so it’s going well.
BOOK NOW to be sure.
