Warming Up

Use this form to email this edition of Warming Up to your friends...
Your Email Address:	Your Friend's Email Address:
Press or to start over.

Monday 21st May 2007

A day off from gigging, but as I am in Edinburgh tomorrow I had resolved to drive about half way there, find somewhere to stay and do a bit of work on my script. But I had to stop to do an hour of press and then wrote yesterday’s sprawling Warming Up so at 2pm I was still only half an hour up the road from Nottingham.
I went to the loo at the service station. I have become a bit obsessed by the new little poster ads that some company is putting up above the urinals. Some of them are for rather nasty services, like one I saw a couple of years ago which was designed to make men question whether their kids were their own and suggesting they did a paternity test. Another one I saw recently was actually an advert for the position of being the man who puts these posters up in toilets, though they dressed it up a bit by referring to the job as “Poster Executive”. The advert boasted that whoever was lucky enough to get this position would earn between 12 and 15 thousand pounds a year, which doesn’t sound like something to show off about to me. You’d think they would keep quiet about the piss-poor wages for this literally piss-poor job and just hope that the idea of being an executive was enough to attract some gullible fool who enjoyed hanging around in public lavatories.
The one I spotted today, was for that rather dubious service that allows you to find the name and address of anyone in the UK, I believe it’s called 192.com. It’s a website that I can only think is run for stalkers or people who want to track down people who don’t want to be tracked down and is thus the rather seedy kind of service that along with paternity tests should only be advertised in a toilet. The advert boasts that you can find the address of anyone using the service and has three pictures as examples to show what it means. The first, appealing to stalkers and terrorists, is of Tony Blairs, the current Prime Minister of England. “He’s on it!” claims the advert, though his address is used as the example on the poster below, showing his address as 10 Downing Street and showing an aerial view of the streets. Which isn’t really all that impressive, for a couple of reasons. Firstly because I don’t think there are many people in the country who need to pay a website to tell that the Prime Minster lives at that address and secondly, because unless I am mistaken, Tony Blairs has actually elected to live in the slightly larger premises at 11 Downing Street to accommodate his large family. So it isn’t actually his address. Thirdly, even if it is his address then he isn’t going to be there for very much longer, giving me limited amount of time to stalk or terrorise him.
The second picture is of a pretty girl, listening to an iPod and laughing – “She’s on it!” claims the ad. She isn’t a famous person, just a pretty, laughing person, so the only reason I can see that they have included this on the advert is to allow sad cases who want to stalk and possibly harm pretty women that will not willingly give them their contact details to know that they can find out the information they covert in a much easier and more sinister way. The advert is thus appealing to perverts at best, rapists at second worst and raping murderers at worst. It’s horrible.
The third picture is somewhat bizarrely, of five or six parachutists jumping out of a plane. “They’re on it!” says the advert. Now I am at a bit of a loss to explain this. Who are they trying to appeal to now? People who want to know the names and addresses of parachutists? You can’t even see the people’s faces as they are wearing helmets and in the distance. What’s going on? Who would be excited about the fact that it is possible to find the address of some anonymous parachutists, presumably only if you get a chance to find out what they are called? Someone, I suppose, more deranged than a stalker, a terrorist who didn’t know where the Prime Minister lived or a murdering rapist.
I suspect that the advertising company who put the cheap poster together had a bit of a limited picture budget and once they’d paid for the one of Tony Blairs and nicked the one of the model from an iPod campaign they really had very few photos left to choose from and went for the cheapest one they could find. Unless they think it’s exciting to parachute and thus some of that glamour might rub off on someone who was secretly trying to find out the address of a parachutist on the internet.
Once you’ve said that everyone is on the database it seems rather pointless to then give three rather random examples. If everyone is included we don’t need to be then told that everyone includes parachutists, unless there is some common knowledge that parachutists are notoriously secretive.
It’s a horrible service in any case and if I was the five year old me I would have raised up my penis and shot my wee all over it. But alas the water pressure has gone and to be honest I am lucky that the force of gravity exists or my wee wouldn’t even have the strength to make it downwards to the urinal.
I was still two and a half hours from Edinburgh at about 5pm, when I decided I was going to stay in Durham tonight.
But the hotel I went to was full and the one they recommended was out of town and they only gave me the postcode which my ancient sat nav cannot cope with, so I decided to press on. But as luck would have it as I headed for the motorway I saw a sign for the hotel at a roundabout and thought “What the hey? There are rooms there. Let’s (or more accurately Let me) go.”
It was called the Lumley Castle Hotel and it turned out to be literally a big castle on the outskirts of Chester-Le-Street (which isn’t half as posh as it sounds). As I drove up the drive I thought that the place would turn out to be prohibitively expensive, but I didn’t really want to spend my evening searching for a hotel, before staying in a Travel Lodge, so I decided to at least find out how much it would set me back.
It was super posh and the receptionist was wearing a kind of medieval costume, but as it turned out the room cost exactly the same as the Holiday Inn in Nottingham, which was not a castle and where no-one dressed up, so I decided to stay. It felt strange checking in to a hotel like this on your own. It’s the kind of place you might go for a wedding, or take a girlfriend that you wanted to impress (if she wasn’t too difficult to impress), but it seemed appropriate to be here on my own. This was my day off and it was cool to be out in the country, breathing fresh air, with the sun beating down and I figured I might get a little bit of work done here. And if I didn’t, it would be a good place to relax and shake off the travelling hardships of the last few days. After finding it quite a gruelling drive from Nottingham to Durham, I am not looking forward to the trip to Inverness next week, which has to be done in a single day, from Hampshire. Maybe I need to get the train. Or a plane. Or invent a teleporter of some kind. Jaunt!
I went for dinner on my own in the posh restaurant, where again the waiters were dressed in a formal, costume uniform and where a starter and main course and a half bottle of wine would cost almost as much as my room. It was much too showy to eat in alone, but I ate alone anyway, making notes for the second half of my script and eating so much food that my ever-re-expanding stomach felt like it would burst.
But it had turned out well. This was a good place to be and I am still hopeful that with a bit of application I can get the script done tomorrow between the still quite long drive north to my next gig. And an early night in a big plush bed which would impress an easily impressed girlfriend (and let’s face it, any girlfriend who is going out with me, is pretty easily impressed) is just the cure I require for what ails me. Though it might be slightly improved by their being an easily impressed girl in there too. She’d have to be easily impressed as I am full of steak and crispy duck pancakes and pretty tired.