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By the time I wanted dinner tonight in Salford all the sandwich places were shut and I didn't have time for a sit down meal, so I thought I'd treat myself to a rare Nandos takeaway. But I didn't fancy waiting in the restaurant for 15 minutes as I suspected most of my audience would be in there and they'd then heckle me when I claimed to be living a more healthy lifestyle. So I stood very close to the restaurant and ordered on line.
Foolishly I assumed that the website would select the nearest restaurant - the one about 25 metres away- and so didn't think too much about it and assumed I was in the Trafford Centre (I know Old Trafford is nearby). I mean how many Nandos does Salford need.
Only once I'd ordered and walked up to the theatre to dump my bag did I bother to google the Trafford shopping centre, which turned out to be over 2 miles away. I had ordered a meal that I had no realistic chance of picking up and eating in time for the gig.
I decided to tweet the world and see if anyone was at the Trafford Centre and fancied a free Nandos. I feel in the heyday of Twitter that it would have found a stranger to eat my meal, but no one bit (literally) and I could only think of my Nandos going cold in a bag in Trafford and the staff assuming the person who had ordered it had died. I felt sad for them. It would be difficult for them to carry on their shift with that bag sitting there. At what point do they throw it out? Will it be there forever?
I did consider ordering again, but time was moving on and when I got to the door of Nandos I suddenly didn't really feel like having this meal after all. I wasn't super hungry and considered not having anything, but then remembered I had an emergency pot of porridge in my bag and so I had that. It was a rather sad substitute. Healthier than a Nandos. But not a Nandos.
To further the false impression that I am a bumbling old man (I'd already accidentally rang a man in Belgium on instagram when I was just trying to reply to his question about when I will be coming to Belgium) I then got lost trying to find my theatre at the Lowry and realised I didn't even know what my theatre was called (despite having played there a dozen times) and so couldn't even ask anyone.
I got there eventually. And did my show to a nearly full theatre (hey if you're playing completely full theatres that have been sold out for months then you are playing the wrong venues - I always get the right one and that's why I am never full - that's what I am telling myself anyway).
There were a few empty seats where I presume people had realised too late that England were playing tonight (or had died since booking their tickets - it was hard to carry on knowing I'd lost them), but luckily that's not a concern for most of my fans (we are moving the time of the Sheffield gig, which coincides with the final, to earlier in the afternoon.
It was another fun gig - a bit more of a Sunday vibe, unsurprisingly, but this show does seem to be resonating.
Back to my hotel and had a Peroni 0% in the bar. Some of the team from House of Games were there and they panicked a but when they saw me as they hadn't remembered booking me, but luckily for them and unfortunately for me, I was not going to be on the show this week.
I was a little sad to be away from home for Father's Day but I had a fun phone chat where Phoebe turned herself into various cartoon animals and I learned how to make myself into a shark saying "poop". So the day wasn't wasted.
Earlier I'd bumped into Caroline, an actor who I'd done a Scene and Heard Play with back in about 2000. These are plays written by young kids and in ours, she was an opera-singing radio and I was a cracked pint glass. It was a fun project to be part of and hard to believe that it was so long ago that it predates this blog. I think I performed in two plays (was one of them with Janet Ellis?- surely I'd remember for sure if that was the case, I must have dreamt it) though the only real mention the excellent charity gets in the blog is from
this time that I went to watch the plays.
Lovely to see Caroline again and she seems to be doing well. Weird to think that the girl who wrote our play will be in her 30s now (I think the kids of some of the kids who did this at the turn of the century have also done the project).
