Another tired and tiring drive to get back to London in time for a below par performance on the Andrew Collings show - thank God this wasn't the week I was hosting it, I was barely able to string a sentence together and inadvertently said the word "cum" and started talking about rude surnames with Collings goading me on like a latter-day
Bill Grundy to commit worse atrocities- he sees me as a threat now and is trying to get me sacked, but is perhaps forgetting that it was Grundy who lost his job and the Sex Pistols who went on to be world-wide superstars.
I stopped off at a service station for breakfast and to my jaded and sleep-deprived eye seemed to have entered one of the nine circles of Hell. Pale and pasty-faced bald men in football shirts and red-eyed women with peroxide hair led tiny potato-faced kids round the shops and the toilets without a smile playing across a single lip.
I ordered a coffee and a ham and egg panini and tried to find a table as far away from the rest of nauseating humanity as possible. Maybe food and caffeine would take this ghostly shroud of misery from the world. Or maybe it is only in these moments of solace and deprivation that we see how the world truly is.
The table I chose was a little wobbly and so to be fair was I. I spilled a tiny amount of coffee as I put it down, but didn't take the instability as a warning to move. I read the paper, feeling slightly sickened by an article in the Sunday Times about the aristocrats who live in the castle of Cawdor (made famous by the play Macbeth). The woman writing it started the article with a little teasing story about her father leading her to his bed. It then skipped away from that, leaving us to wonder whether she was subjected to incestuous underage sex, in what some might consider a salacious fashion. At the end she revealed that fortunately her father had collapsed the minute he'd got her into bed, so she would never know what his plans had been. It seemed an unpleasant way to write about a true incident. To turn it into the hook that would keep you reading the story. Well done Sunday Times.
Half way through I nudged my wonky table with my wonky leg and sent a quarter of the cup of coffee flying over my trousers. Why had I not moved when I had seen the initial danger? Now I would have to drive with coffee soaked jeans. I moved to a more stable table, but too late. The damage had been done.
Life on the road is not as glamorous as it might appear.
