An exciting development for people who spend 30 or so minutes a night counting up coins and putting them in bags to pay in to banks. Some NatWest branches now have special pay in machines which will sort and count your cash for you. The slight drawback for the traveling coin-counting person is that there seems to be no way of knowing in advance which branches will have this magic machine, so you will still end up putting your coins in bags and then only when you get to the branch realise you can empty them out and all your work was for nothing. For other traveling coin counters I will let you know that there is such a machine on the NatWest on Cheltenham High Street (and also one in the bank next door to the Glee Club in Cardiff, though I didn't find out about that one until I had paid my coins in).

Because all my coins were bagged I ended up performing a little comedy sketch for an audience of myself in which I would struggle to pick up my little bags and then try to get them undone and their contents on to the little conveyor belt before the coin hatch closed up. It took me five goes to pay in the coins from the last couple of days and it was only on the last attempt that I realised it might be quicker to empty the bags out first and then pour them into the greedy coin guzzling monster.

If I had known in advance I could have just walked down here with my bucket and saved myself a lot of time. I had been thinking of buying myself some kind of coin sorting and counting machine, but if these new paying in machines start appearing everywhere then there will be no need. Does anyone know if any NatWest branch in West London has one? I can't find any info on line. It would make my life a whole lot easier if it did. Please don't direct me to those supermarket CoinStar machines as they take something like 13 pence from every pound as a commission and I am not prepared to give away 13% of SCOPE's money to save me half an hour.

The machine spat out a few coins each time. Most of them disappeared on a second attempt, but a few persistent ones refused to go down the coin throat. One of these turned out to a two pound coin that wasn't a two pound coin, but some similar looking foreign currency, so I was glad the machine had discovered my genuine mistake, rather than a bank teller who would have judged me and probably arrested me. And the count that the machine came up with was also two pounds out on what I thought I'd given in (taking into account the bogus coin), but I think that might have been my mistake. The fact that it came to an exact figure with no pence left over suggests the thing works properly. But the chances of their being a bank with this facility near enough to my various hotels to make this useful to me are slim. But if there is a list of banks with the coin paying in machine anywhere I would love to have access to it. Is Nathaniel West reading this? Let me know mate.

Before the Lincoln gig I sat in my dressing room looking at myself in the unforgiving light bulb surrounded mirror. I looked old and tired. Though if I looked from the right angle I still looked handsome in a crumpled kind of way (if you ignored my moustache, which I seem able to do). From the wrong angle I looked like a fat and aged toad. Gravity is starting to take its effect and at the right (or rather) wrong angle I got a good vision of what I will look like when I am old. But as long as I can always present myself to the world at the more flattering angle (which might be hard if more than one person is looking at me) I can carry off still looking vaguely attractive for a couple more years.

But dressing room mirrors are harsh - I can't find it now, but I think I wrote a blog about this in 2007. Leastways it made it into my upcoming book. It was about noticing how grey my hair was. But of course I wish now I could go back to that time. And in three years time when I am a toad from every angle I will wish it was 2010 again. Such is life.

(In actual fact it's probable the entry I am thinking about is from 2003 - I was slightly liberal with the time-line in HNTGU especially if the themes were universal. Good that I gave myself 8 years until I would be old back then. So I have a little over a year to go.)

I realised though that I have to make an effort to get fit again and stop eating so much crap. It's hard on tour, but weight is piling on. I resolved to go for a run in the morning. But then again I was waiting a whole big pack of those Oozy Opal Fruits at the time, so maybe I am on a hiding to nothing.

Slightly disappointing turn out in Lincoln. Much less than we got for the Collings and Herrin podcast at the same venue last year, which made me a bit concerned that Collings is the draw, until I remembered that people had traveled from all over the North of England (and even Scotland) for that rare sojourn up the country for the double act. And reassuringly the audience was back to normality. It consisted mainly of weird men, but just normally weird ones, with an occasional one who had somehow snared himself a nice looking woman. God knows what is going on in Cheltenham, but doubtless the police will find out in the next few years. Some kind of awful scientific experiment no doubt.

I gave a spirited and lively performance which belied my weariness and mirror-induced world-weariness and then headed back to my Holiday Inn Express. It was the second night in a row I had stayed at this chain and my room was disconcertingly similar. Luckily this was a twin-bedded room tonight, so I had one point of reference to differentiate it from the double-bedded room of last night. Otherwise I might have found myself stuck in an awful Groundhog Day from whence I would never escape.

Thirty-seven tour performances down, twenty-eight to go. Things may feel a little brighter in a week or two.

I am looking forward to a pedant pointing out that according to them I have done thirty-five gigs and have twenty-seven to go and then pedantically pointing out that I did two shows in both York and Bristol and am doing two on the night of my DVD record in Cardiff.

But they probably won't point it out now that I have pointed that out. So I have ruined all our fun.

Going for a run.

Buy Collings and Herrin T-shirts here and AIOTM T shirts here.

For details of the Hitler Moustache tour click here and you can book tickets here for The Lyric Comedy Nights

[ Email this edition of Warming Up to a friend ]