I set off for Manchester at 4pm. I figured this would give me five hours to get there, and it’s a three and a half hour trip without any problems, so that would surely give me leeway for any unexpected hold-ups. I was supposedly playing two gigs tonight – first on at the Frog and Bucket and then across town to Salford University. This would help make the whole deal more cost effective as neither gig was a big payer and my modest hotel accommodation (plus parking) was already eating up about 60% of my fee.
Getting out of London was predictably a little bit of a bind, but once on the M40 things were progressing smoothly. I was looking forward to stopping off at the service station and having a coffee and maybe stocking up with some healthy M&S treats for the journey. I could also have done with going to the loo.
Then the electronic signs started warning that the motorway was closed between junctions 4 and 5. Some people started getting off the road at junctions 2 and 3 and the queues that were forming there should have been a warning to me. But there was very little I could do about it. 1.8 miles from junction 4 (according to my satellite navigation system, which was also giving me an estimated time of arrival) things came to a stand-still. I moved about 0.2 of a mile in the next half an hour and decided to ring the Frog and Bucket to check what time I would be on and to warn them of possible tardiness. Another hour went by and my eta was getting later and later. I realised that I wouldnÂ’t make it by 8.30 as they had hoped. I rang again and we agreed that I would be moved to the middle or final position in the evening. This would have a knock-on effect on the Salford gig. I had to ring and say that there was a good possibility that I wouldnÂ’t be able to make it. My first priority was the gig that had been booked in first.
After another hour I had reached the junction. Another phone call and it was agreed that I would have to go on last at the Frog (and have to be there by 10.20 – about an hour on from my current eta) and I had to let Salford Uni know that I wouldn’t be making it. Many apologies if you hoped to see me there. I have agreed to do the gig next time I am in Manchester. I had only progressed so far by getting into the slip road for the junction, and would now have to find my way along country roads. I wondered if I had made a mistake and should have just waited for the M40 to clear, but it wasn’t moving at all and I had not information on what the hold up would be.
Of course a lot of other people were trying the same tactic, which meant the A roads were similarly clogged up.
I had been in the car for about three and a half hours now, and was getting hungry and quite needed the loo. Though I wasn’t moving it was still as stressful as driving, especially when a light started flashing telling me to stop as I needed to add more coolant. This large sign kept flashing for the rest of the journey and there was nothing I could do. I had no coolant and there were no garages open and I didn’t have time to get off the road anyway – even though I wasn’t moving. I was stressed enough already. I hate being late and I hate letting people down. This wasn’t really my fault, but I was wishing I had set off just an hour earlier. I would have been in my luxurious Travelodge by now, getting ready for the gig. But I had had to play one more game of poker before I headed off. And I’d come 4th when someone with a 26 had fluked trip 2s on the river against my A10 with an Ace on the flop, and so missed out on the prize money anyway. Poker is evil. Do not play it. Ever…. To be honest, I would have still left at 4 o clock anyway, but it is nice to have something else to blame.
Near to West Wycombe I passed a shop that almost made the whole experience worthwhile. It was a sandwich shop with the initially brilliant name of “Baguette-Me-Knot”. I laughed at this incredibly inventive pun. I would never have seen this shop if things had progressed smoothly. Yet being stuck outside that shop for a good fifteen minutes gave me more time to think about the pun than I might have done if I had just whizzed by (and let’s face it, if I had been whizzing I would have been on the M40 and never seen it).
Why was the Knot bit spelt K-N-O-T? A Forget-Me-Not’s Not is spelt N-O-T. The pun was flawed. Unless all the baguettes served in the shop were twisted and bent until they formed a variety of different knots – “Can I have a BLT on rye bread formed into a sheepshank please?” There was no way of finding out if this was the case as the shop was closed. It began to annoy me. Had they just spelled “not” incorrectly when they wrote the signs and were now forced to live with their mistake? Or were they too stupid to even realise it was an error?
But having too much time to sit and think about this conundrum it struck me that they had been forced to add the K. I could see how the whole scenario had panned out. They’d been trying to think of a name for a posh sandwich shop and one of them had realised that Baguette and Forget sound quite similar. They had riffed through a variety of names on this theme “Don’t You Baguette About Me”, “Forgive and Baguette”, “Lest We Baguette” and so on, but none of them had quite cut the mustard (which is an even more important concern in a sandwich based shop). Then one of the counter-staff had suggested “Baguette-Me-Not”. Everyone had laughed. It was the end of a long day and they’d suggested a lot of names and this one was easily the best and they were glad to have solved their dichotomy. They had agreed that that would be the name and all gone home happy, occasionally chuckling to themselves about the name they’d come up with, but each time slightly less than the time before.
Then in the middle of the night the owner had woken up in a cold sweat realising that the name “Baguette-Me-Not” was in fact horribly negative. It was the same as saying I do NOT want a baguette, so baguette-me-not, because a baguette is the last thing I want in the world right now. Cool kids from about 1994 could come into the shop and say, “Baguette Me” and then once the baguette was ready could add with an impish grin, “Not!” before running off into the near to West Wycombe streets.
This would be fine for almost any other shop than a posh sandwich shop, but posh sandwich shops make 90% of their earnings from selling baguettes and now they had a name for the shop which essentially told people that this was a shop for people who didnÂ’t want baguettes.
Now they’d spent all day coming up with a name and didn’t want to go through that rigmarole again, so the owner had to think fast. The only way to keep the pun, but get away from the negative connotations was to put a K in front of the NOT and make KNOT. Now, thank God, the pun still roughly worked, but did not warn people off buying baguettes and if any cool kids from about 1994 came in and said “Baguette Me” and then later added, “Not!” once the sandwich was ready, then the server could say, “No, it’spelt K-N-O-T so your clever
WayneÂ’s World reference does not work and you will have to pay for this. And the cool kid from about 1994 would have to grudgingly cough up the cash, knowing that it was he who was the fool.
The owner was so focused on keeping the original name that he lost sight of the fact that the name he now had made no real sense. Perhaps he woke up in the middle of the next night, once the leaflets and signs had been made and realised that his only way out of this was now to come up with the worldÂ’s first knotted baguettes. It was desperate but the only way for him not to look like an idiot anymore. Ironically the unusual shaped baguettes became a massive success in the near to West Wycombe area, enabling the owner to open another branch near to High Wycombe. But the people near to High Wycombe were more sophisticated and didnÂ’t go for the gimmick and that shop shut down. Luckily the shop near to West Wycombe was successful enough to more than cover the losses and the owner realised that he had been too ambitious and should be happy with what he had now, and with the fact that he had successfully thought of a way to make the whole Baguette-Me-Knot name to work.
Or alternatively, the shop might have been opened by the ex-England wicket-keeper Alan Knott, to help him through his retirement from cricket. But in that case the shop should have been called Baguette-Me-Knott and so Alan Knott would still have to make up for the mistake by making his baguettes in a knotted shape (which would be doubly funny given his name), unless I am wrong and his name is only spelt with one T, in which forget the last bit of what I just said. In fact, baguette the last bit of what I just said.
Anyway I think I solved the mystery.
Once on the A40 traffic seemed to be flowing again and I let out a sigh of relief, but suddenly things clogged again. My eta was moving up passed 10pm to 10.05 to 10.10 and nothing was moving. I decided to ring the club once the eta was at 10.15 if I wasnÂ’t moving and tell them I was heading home tonight, but would see them tomorrow, traffic permitting. But at an eta of 10.12, suddenly the traffic started moving. I arrived at the M40 and traffic was flowing smoothly. Typically if I had stayed on the motorway I would clearly have got going much faster, but I would have missed out on the whole baguette-me-knot scenario, so who is the richer man here?
But I couldnÂ’t afford to waste any time. Any more delays and I would be late for the gig, so I couldnÂ’t stop for food, or for wee or to stretch my legs. I was tired and freaked out from having been cooped up in a car for 4 hours with still two and a half hours of driving to go. But I needed to go fast and by somehow subverting the time/space continuum (and not by going at 100mph at all, your honour) I got my eta down to 10.05pm. Some roadworks meant it went back up to 10.07, but I got it back to 10.06pm. It was all very exciting. Would I make it in time? I was at least very glad to have invested in the sat nav, because I would have been delayed by at least quarter of an hour once in Manchester otherwise, looking for the venue.
In the end I got there at 10.08 and parked up on the road and though I ran to the wrong end of Oldham St, I did eventually get to the venue in time to both have a wee and a bottle of water before rushing down to go on stage.
It was weird preparation for a gig and my head was all over the place, but I managed to get through the twenty minutes all right. Even including a riff on the baguette-me-knot idea, which didnÂ’t completely die on its arse. So maybe I got some new material out of this experience, which will make up for the loss of the other gig and all the stress.
It was a lovely gig and a great audience and I donÂ’t think they would have noticed that I was frazzled at the edges. Afterwards a couple came up and said they had enjoyed it and that they read
Warming Up and could they buy me a drink. I said that I needed to find a hotel and some food and so I wouldnÂ’t have one. I could see from their disappointed faces that they thought I was a bit rude or at least hadnÂ’t lived up to their expectations. I hope after they have read this they will forgive me if I seemed brusque. I had been in my car for six and a half hours, had ten minutes to get ready for the gig and hadnÂ’t eaten since 2pm. But thanks for the offer of the drink, guys.
I still needed to find my hotel (very nearby), but then take my car to a car-park (some way away) and carry all my stuff back to the hotel (it was only as I came back that I realised I should have dropped it off first), including four shirts on hangers.
A drunk strange woman in the street leered at me, shouting, “What have you got there?” referring to my shirts. I didn’t reply. “Oh, nothing,” she sneered. I chose to ignore this too. Even though her own behaviour had more than bordered on being rude she shouted at me for being ignorant, presumably because I hadn’t wanted to engage in conversation with a stranger who was yelling at me.
I went out in search of food at midnight, but was too weary to do anything more than go into the nearest chippy and get fish and chips. I ate this alone in my Travelodge room. It made me feel sick.
It was the perfect end to a perfect day.
