I am based in Cheddar for three days as we mop up the West Country gigs for this tour. Staying with my parents, with my girlfriend (plus Reliable Pete as an awkward third wheel), it feels more like a holiday than work for most of the day. Hotels don't let you sleep in as long as your like and don't provide free home cooked meals, or have my dad in them saying potentially offensive things to my tour manager. And it's all free. But I have to say that given my parents had the pleasure of bringing me up and enjoying all the funny things I said and did, they owe me a lot and in the few years they have left they would have to do an awful lot to get anywhere near paying me back. So acting as my slaves for a few days doesn't cut much mustard with me. There are people out there who would be hundreds of pounds to clean my arse, and they got to do that for twelve years - all right seventeen years and then once again in the nineteenth year- plus I did millions of brilliant jokes for them during my childhood for nothing (like saying "Wee wee, poo poo, bottom" over and over again for literally years). I really should be charging them to let me stay.
I am probably the nicest and most generous son in the world.
My girlfriend and I went for a run round the resevoir whilst we waited for my ungrateful mum to make us lunch. As I have mentioned before I went through a period in my late teens when I did this fairly regularly and could go round twice in under 30 minutes. That's about how long it takes me to go round once these days, and it struck me how fit I must have been back there. In my mind I was a podgy and unsporty teenager, but I must have been in pretty good shape to zip around a four to five mile run in such short time. Yesterday we had driven into Cheddar down the steep and winding Shipham Hill. I reminisced about how I used to cycle up this incline a couple of times a week to see my girlfriend. I think it would kill me if I attempted that now. I must have been a lot more robust than I remember.
I've been exercising enough to find the run today reasonably comfortable and we enjoyed looking at the lambs gamboling around on the slopes of the res. It struck me that it is 25 years since I was first running around this man-made body of water and wondered if I might still be doing so in another 25 years. Check out Warming Up 2036 to find out. I imagine that it might take me at least an hour to get round by then. Unless one of my descendants is casting my ashes into the breeze in which case it might be quicker.
Gigging in Taunton tonight and I had a couple of hundred in, which made for a fun show. Though I was in a bit of a bad mood as I had been informed by Reliable Pete that the ushers at the venue would not be able to hold the buckets for the charity collection at the end because they were "too busy". I was a bit gob-smacked by this. In my six or so years of collecting at gigs the theatre staff have always been happy to help with this. It doesn't take very long and only needs one or two people. Indeed the other times I have been at this venue there has been no issue, so I didn't understand why anyone would be so unhelpful or obstructive. I wondered what the extra duties that the ushers in Taunton had to do that ushers in all other theatres didn't have on their plate. Does Taunton require super-ushing of some kind.
The staff there were very friendly and efficient, so I made the assumption that this wasn't their choice. And maybe it was a small thing that I shouldn't have worried about. Pete and my girlfriend volunteered to do it anyway. But I am passionate and probably a little obsessive about getting as much money as possible for the programmes and it pissed me off that they couldn't even spare one person (and usually I would have been travelling alone and would have had no one to assist me). It put me in a bad mood. I don't ask for much at venues and am very easy going in general, but I tweeted about this because I thought it was a bit crap. I had just received an email from my management asking if there were any venues I particularly did or didn't want to visit on next year's tour and even though this is a small thing it seemed a bit disrespectful to me and I might easily have decided to say I didn't want to come here again. I didn't, because I am not that much of a prick (just enough of a prick to complain on Twitter) but it's a reminder of how a positive attitude at a theatre can really help encourage an act to return there - I will always do my best to fit Aldershot and Chorley into my tour schedule simply because of the enthusiasm of the staff. But the decision impacted on the show a little bit as my annoyance stayed with me and then was compounded by people on Twitter criticising me for not holding the buckets myself (though I man the merch stall - and sign autographs for anyone who wants one afterwards, so it's not like I am lazy and also as I pointed out lug boxes of programmes up and down the country and bags of coins to the bank most days and make a point of putting the programmes on the seats myself whenever this is possible- it's not like I am up myself). In the end it was a good show, but it hadn't provided the oasis of calm that is preferable.
Pete and my girlfriend did well with the collecting and the ushers did look busy so maybe I was in the wrong. Though I realised afterwards that they had gone through the venue and collected the programmes from the empty seats for us. Which I would have been perfectly happy to do once my signing was over. So it would have been pretty easy to come to a compromise.
I had worried that the staff might have thought I was being critical on Twitter and indeed the news had spread quickly as perhaps I knew it would, but they were very supportive in fact. So though I felt like I had probably been a bit more of a dick than I needed to have been, I didn't feel like that much of a dick.
We headed home where my parents had laid on a supper of cheese and ham and fancy bread. Honestly, after all I have given them and they couldn't even be bothered to cook me something warm.
Bloody Hell. And some people think I am a diva. Well if I am can you blame me, with awful parents like this?
