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This weekend is just a short jaunt away but I still miss the family of course. I try not to think about them too much, as impossible as that is, but there's a weird poignancy whenever anyone comes to the front door, as I get a notification from my Ring doorbell and can thus watch the door being answered (or my family popping out for a dog walk) and these little snapshots of family life are a little bit heartbreaking. It's lovely to see them (or spy on them) and this morning I laughed as Ernie rushed to see who was at the door, excited, even though it was just the postman. I laughed and then missed them all even more. The mundane moments are the most human.
It's a brutal couple of days for Bollings and me. Even with an hour's drive under out belts last night, we were on the road for over five hours again today. It's a tough drive for my tour manager, but it's tiring to be a passenger too. I slept OK last night, rather on and off, but I didn't properly wake up til 8, which helped. But I need to make sure any future tour dates are better organised than this. These journeys were irritating as a young man. but as a middle-aged/elderly gentleman they really take it out of me. It's not like talking for 90 minutes on stage each night is an easy ride (but the stand up tour is proving to be much less tiring than the podcast one, despite being more intense).
Ipswich today and over 300 people in, making it surprisingly one of the top 10 selling gigs of the tour. I've hardly played here (though may have got some people in from nearby Colchester). My memories of Ipswich are mainly bad (
being sick on my own diarrhoea and
having to attend a speed awareness course) so I joked about hoping tonight would be better than the former event.
But Ipswich is never easy and about 35 minutes in to the first half there was a shout of anguish from the audience and it turned out that someone had passed out. This was a bit earlier than usual for this event (just after I'd shown pictures of Ally and Sally, which admittedly are quite scary) and the person who'd gone down was a woman. But it became clear it was emergency enough that we'd have to stop the show. There was a doctor in the house (I forgot to ask which was annoying as you don't get that many chances to say that) and the lady recovered fairly quickly. She apparently said it had happened to her once before at a George Michael concert at the O2 twenty years ago, so it was clearly my raw sexuality that had done this to her.
The show started up again after a ten minute break and the audience stayed with me. But Ipswich is definitely my bogey town.
Later in the hotel room I closed the curtains. They needed to be tugged pretty hard to get to the end of the window and as I pulled I inadvertently hit a hanging lamp above the desk and it smashed into the wall and shattered into a thousand pieces.
Overall the day was still better than me puking on my own shit. But it was close.
