My current tour obsession are probably not interesting to anyone else in the world. Unless you spend a lot of time counting up coins. But once again I had been ecstatically excited to discover yesterday that the George St Nat West had a coin paying in machine. This was not only good news for today, but should also mean that when I am here in August my SCOPE paying in should take a fraction of the time.
See, no one but me could surely be getting excited by that. But the prospect of just turning up with my blue bucket and pouring it into a machine and allowing it to do all tedious counting is delicious (and yet somehow, as I have mentioned, a little disappointing - the autistic Luddite in me enjoys the manual counting process).
And yet today was something of a disappointment. In Sheffield I had located a machine but it had not been working, but here in Edinburgh I poured in all my coins from last night, laughing like a mad professor at how I had cheated the world and was paying in my coins with no labour on my part. But the little conveyor belt ground to a halt and pretty much all of the coins poured out of the coin return at the bottom of the machine. I was hoping that it wasn't something I had done. I had managed to retrieve an Everton mint that someone had humorously put in the bucket just as it was about to disappear into the machine. Had I missed something else that had clogged up the workings. I am not sure that these machines have a specific slot for the Everton mint. Although it would be nice to be able to pay in sweets when you had too many and then withdraw them when they were in short supply. Such a bank would make an excellent strip for a 1970s edition of Whizzer and Chips. If I invent a time machine the first thing I am going to do is go back and submit that idea.
I will be a millionaire.
It turned out that a little under ten pounds had been banked and I then had to laboriously scoop the rest of the coins back into the bucket.
I tried again, this time feeding in a few coins at a time, but again at around the ten pound mark the machine stopped and paid out the rest of my money, like a quite boring fruit machine.
Remembering the famous Scotch man Robert the Bruce. I tried again. But the same thing happened. So I gave up and paid in the Glasgow money which was already bagged up. In my hubrisitic confidence with new machines I had almost unbagged it all and tipped it into the bucket. Thank goodness I resisted that temptation. Some voice in my head had clearly been saying, "Remember Frankingstein Rich, all new scientific developments can only end in disaster."
I asked one of the ladies in the bank if I was doing anything wrong and she went back into the bowels of the bank to check with some nerd too ugly to be out front with the pretty cashiers what was going on.
She came back and told me that the machine apparently had a problem with pound coins and kept shutting down. This is far from perfect of course, but I decided to pick out and bag up the pounds and see if the rest of the shrapnel would get gobbled up by this precocious and fussy machine.
And without the pounds it pretty much worked, but overall saved me very little time. Hopefully by August the teething troubles will be sorted out. Or pound coins will be removed from the list of legal currency.
Either is fine with me.
I have decided to get back into my old healthy ways and so have started listing all my food intake and its calorific value again, as well as doing more exercise. I managed a good 40 minutes in the Virgin gym that is so familiar to me from (the first two weeks) of the Edinburgh Fringe.
It's a dangerous pay off because I felt a lot better for having done some moving around, but by late afternoon I felt even more tired than ever and right before my gig in Perth I would much rather have slept than done a show.
I had got to my hotel quite early and thought about sleeping, but decided against it again. Partly so as not to get jet-lagged, but mainly because I had a bit of a weird bed.
The hotel turned out to be a good 25 minute drive out of Perth and lovely and old-fashioned as it was (they didn't take a credit card swipe on arrival, preferring to trust me - I am not used to all this faith being put in me by hotels). I had the most amazing view from my window of a medium to fast flowing river and a hill with a field with horses in it. My single bed though looked like it might have been the one Miss Haversham was to sleep in on the eve of the wedding that never happened (google it you philistine).
I had thought that my four poster bed in... whatever forsaken place that was (Sutton Coldfield?)... was a romantic place to have a wank, but this was (as I believe Simon Donald of Viz commented on Twitter) a wank chariot. It was a bed designed for one and yet had a canopy of pink chintz at its head. There was even a little step up to the bed. Was this a room for a girl who wanted to be a princess or a tiny old lady. Either way it was surreal to be here.
I managed to get through the gig despite my increasing weariness. It was my 13th in a row, since that "night off" in Cardiff (mainly taken up with driving from Yorkshire). But just six more gigs to do and this marathon of unbroken comedy nights will be done and I get the luxury of two nights off before the next ones.
There's a couple of monster drives coming up too though, to add to my blessings. But I will be in my own bed on Thursday at least.
Though will it have a chintzy canopy above it? Only if my girlfriend reads this and really gets to work on it.
