Great to wake up in my own bed, but psychologically I am not sure that coming home for the night was the best thing. Coming home is associated in my brain with having a day off and maybe I switched slightly into that mode, because in spite of a good sleep I was tired all day. On balance it was the right thing to do - I had some time with my girlfriend and got some washing done and had a look at my snooker table (though didn't have time to construct it and play a frame of me versus me).
But then I was whisked away from sanctuary and taken to Lincoln, a town that despite me having been there a few times has yet to take me to their hearts. I'd sold about 150 tickets tonight, which was up on last year, but left plenty of room for more. Though it was a quality 150 people and they were a delight to play to and made the room feel pretty full. Unusually my tiredness followed me on to stage and I found it hard to focus and nearly lost my train of thought a couple of times, but I kept up the energy and don't think anyone noticed it, until I mentioned it at the interval on Twitter. At the start of the second half someone slightly unhelpfully heckled, "Wake Up" which might have been funny to the dozen people who had looked at Twitter, but was probably confusing and seemed a bit rude to the others. And I just mumbled some stuff in reply which didn't help too much. I had to fight through the fatigue. The second half in particular needs concentration and energy. And once I had done it I could at least go to bed. I realised that this was my 19th gig in 20 days (not including the extra two gigs that I did in Glasgow), so perhaps it's not surprising that my batteries are a little flat. I have another eleven gigs in the next twelve days and then it's a much anticipated Easter break. Thirty gigs in thirty-two days is a pretty punishing schedule by any standards.
My disciple tonight turned out to have a brilliant job, which if the show wasn't so packed with stuff I might have had made more of, but he was a distributor of vegetable seeds, so for once I was able to make a deliberately eggy bit properly funny by saying, "Come with me, I will make you a distributor of man seed." Though given I do a variant of the fisher of men joke every night that one fell into my lap, so to speak. I was also able to ask him, with his seed expertise, why he thought that the plant that never ghrow had not ghrown, but he didn't have any ideas.
Apart from this it was a fairly regular show, though (spoiler alert) the loud explosion that comes towards the end of the show did rather shock a pregnant lady on the front row and I think might have woken up her unborn baby from its uteral slumber. I saw her rubbing her bump and slightly worried about the medical repercussions of the explosion, but I think the worst that could happen is that it might have hastened the birth and she didn't look quite ready for that as yet. I just have to hope no one brings a horse into the gig because the noise would drive that crazy and create an incident. I hope the baby enjoyed the show.
Increasingly Unreliable Pete had got the wrong hotel details tonight and taken us to the Holiday Inn Express, instead of the Holiday Inn, which are confusingly very close together in the same small city. We hadn't had time to check in beforehand as a result and then we ended up on a bit of a tour of Lincoln as we tried to find the right hotel. I was pretty sure we were meant to go over the bridge, but Pete took us into town, ignoring the satnav to take a right rather than a left... Then he decided to trust the satnav which took us to a blocked off road. Eventually we managed to work out where we were going and such confusions are the norm on tour and I certainly had plenty of such incidents when I was on my own. And it's really the fault of the Holiday Inn for having two hotels across the river from each other. Holiday Ian is a prick. He shouldn't be allowed to run hotels. He's always on holiday. Hence his name.
