This morning I sat in a coffee shop eating my breakfast and writing my blog and looking out the window at the Brizzle drizzle.
It's always rather pleasant to be gigging for two nights in the same place as you can relax a little and have a look around and you don't have to get out of your hotel and back on to the motorway for an arduous drive.
Of course I know Bristol a little bit as I grew up near to here and this was the big city that we would occasionally come up to on a Saturday to shop. Though we usually went to Weston-Super-Mare. Bristol seemed huge and frightening to me then, as I was a timid small town boy. Now, of course, it seems rather quaint and provincial because I am a hardened city dweller and it has changed a lot since 1984. I do rather like it here, though I don't think I have seen a town of this size with so many casinos. Which might not be a bad thing from my gambling minded point of view, but is still quite remarkable.
I had a little walk around a market after breakfast, buying a little notebook from India at a stall specialising in them. Not that I need any more notebooks, I have hundreds, many empty, many with just the first few pages filled with some stunted diary or attempt to organise my life. Yet still I can't resist buying more. I would later write half a diary entry in it, but goodness knows if I will keep it up. I am very bad at getting diary entries written every day. I just don't have the staying power. There is no circumstance in which I could write any kind of account of my life every single day, year after year. Only a mentallist could do that.
But it was enjoyable kicking round this little market and then I walked back to my hotel so I could drive down to Cheddar to see the folks. My new sat nav took me a route that I did not know about before, which managed to cut out a huge chunk of the city and avoid all the crowds flocking to the football, so all is forgiven for the days I couldn't get it to work.
The gig tonight was a bit of a disappointment after the blinding one yesterday. It was much harder work, but I think I managed to do quite well, dealing with a slightly restless crowd, who certainly weren't as into me as last night's. Last night I was feeling that I had really cracked things as a stand up now, and tonight I wasn't so sure. But there have been several points in the last three years where I have felt and documented this exact phenomenon. I am definitely getting better though and still enjoying the journey, even if once I was back at the Holiday Inn Express I did have to take a few minutes to settle down and get things in perspective. Because as always a good gig makes you too hyper and that's hard to come down from and a less good one makes you feel a little down and disaffected and you have to pull yourself out of that too. But it's all good.
