7297/19817
It was a long old day, one of those days where you can’t believe that the stuff that happened in the morning was the same day as the stuff that happened in the afternoon. Not that it was full of spectacle and incident - almost the opposite.
I’d had a bad night’s sleep and Ernie, missing his mum, had come to sleep in bed with me. Which was nice, but he kept waking me up. I didn’t think I’d be up for a Park Run after this, but somehow, after breakfast and once the kids had been collected by their Nanna, I felt full of energy and decided to go for it. I don’t know what was up with me last week when I took over 32 minutes to complete the course and felt like death, but this week I ran easily and finished five minutes faster, in a much more average time (still two and a half minutes behind last year’s PB). I was glad I did it.
I then had to get home and pack for a weekend away. I am filming a TV thing in Manchester tomorrow and moved things around for them so as a result the production company has sorted out cabs for me for my various jaunts. So I got driven to Hay in an executive cab, quietly snoozing on and off on the long journey and catching up with Nick Mohammed’s sitcom Intelligence.
Then I was in the Harry Potter world of Hay-on-Wye where all the shops are book shops that probably have magic wand shops inside them somewhere to do a talk about my book in a castle. Natalie Haynes was an expert interviewer, her copy of the book was filled with professional looking tabs and notes. We chatted about masculinity and how comedy can help us cope with horrible things and how great my wife is.
Natalie is a veteran of literary festivals and a proper author who hardly ever writes entire books about bollocks, but luckily I know her from the stand up circuit and so she looked after me as she expertly chatted with all the academics and journalists in the green room. I stood up to meet a couple of broadcasting legends but as I shook hands with the first one I realised I was still kneeling with one knee on the sofa I’d just stood up from and so it looked like I was treating them like royalty. I then went to shake hands with the second person and did something that I’ve never managed to do in my long history of shaking hands - I totally missed their thumb with my thumb and overshot the handshake and ended up trying to shake anyway. I am not sure what it ended up being, but assume I had to sort of turn my hand over to grasp the back of their hand. Maybe it was their fault not mine as it takes two to handshake, but I suspect it was my fault. I apologised for my terrible handshake and they said don’t worry about it, so they were blaming me or letting me take the blame.Later a group of egg head writers from all over the world sat discussing the nature of atonement and how in Spanish the word used is la expiación, which sounds less harsh and unforgiving and more beautiful. I had nothing to add, but waited for the conversation to turn to knobs, and then I’d show these brainboxes a thing or two. Sadly I had to get a taxi to Manchester, so I missed this part of the evening.
It was a long journey from Hay, along bendy country lanes and the run and the lack of sleep and the comedown from the bollock chat hit me hard, but I couldn’t sleep. Who would have thought driving round the UK would be so exhausting, but I was in a car for about seven hours today. I tried to watch some telly but the phone coverage through this part of the country was extremely variable.
No one can have a harder job than me.
I was at my hotel by 10.30pm though the driver went to the wrong place and then when I got out to walk he started moving before the door was shut and nudged me along the pavement a bit. Even though Catie had already checked in the man on the desk couldn’t find our names in the system. But I’d been too brain dead to think that they would have booked the room in her maiden name (and not mention me at all). I managed to text her and she was off stage by this point so that sorted it out and the receptionist then gave me a key without question. Which is a bit worrying when you think about it. I was a man guessing the name of someone staying at the hotel, with no ID and no mention of my name on the booking. Sure, go and wait in the room for the actual occupant. I can’t see a problem with that.
