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No Ernie with us this morning, so we managed a lie in til 7.15am. What a treat! I wonder if we can persuade his grandparents to look after him for the next five to fifteen years. I used the bonus energy to go for a 6km run and my fitness is definitely improving as it was all fairly joyful, even the hills, though I was going a lot slower than I do at Park Run.
I had a quick lunch and prepped dinner and made some crazy seed bread for breakfast and then I was off to Salford for another couple of RHLSTPs - the penultimate gig of 2023, but podcasts that won't be going out for about six months. It seemed impossible that it was four years since I last did the Lowry - I used to come here every year, so it's a very familiar venue, but it felt like the last one was much more recent. Just a trick played on the mind due to old age and the Covid years. Weirdly this morning's run felt like it must have happened days ago. I didn't feel any tiredness or muscle ache and kept having to remind myself it had definitely happened. It's possible that there's some kind of time portal betwixt Hertfordshire and Greater Manchester.
It wasn't quite sold out, but almost and though it felt a bit like a Sunday gig to begin with, things warmed up and we got two entertaining and candid interviews and some silly flights of fancy. Absolutely lovely to see Katie Mulgrew, a very funny stand up and award winning writer and fittingly the daughter of one of my guests from the last time I did RHLSTP in this venue, Jimmy Cricket. I am not sure that she can really count as a nepo baby as I don't know how much influence Jimmy holds these days and she's also doing very different stuff to him, but her son's confusion over his grandad's left and right wellies and the subsequent analysis of the joke is, I think, worthy of an hour of stand up and so that boy might be my guest the next time I'm in this theatre.
Justin Moorhouse was predictably amazing value - indiscreet and full of great stories about everything from a precious Captain Hook to Justin pretending to be a ghost. It's hard to believe that Justin was ever anything but a comedian, as he's such a natural, but he came to it relatively late, not starting til he was nearly 30. We shared an Edinburgh flat back in 2010 (I think) but I remember very little about it and Justin struggled to remember the names of most of the people in his own stories. We're getting old.
As always lovely to meet the audience afterwards. The greedy Lowry take a hefty 25% + VAT on merch sales, meaning that they make more money on me selling my stuff than I do (when you take into account what I paid to get the stock). It's one of the great annoyances of touring. If their staff were selling the stuff for me, as they would do for big musicals and bands and famous comics, then it would be understandable, but I am a one man band (with a bit of help from Bec) and it felt a bit much to be handing them basically a third of the meagre amount I had taken. Especially when they started turning the lights off at the end to hurry the people who'd waited 30 minutes along.
But it's an opportunity to meet some of the audience and they're an enjoyably mixed bag of lunatics and drunks, but lovely to hear stories of how the podcast has kept people going through tough times. Or just made them laugh. I just about kept my energy up til the last people came through. The diet and exercise is definitely helping me get through these mentally demanding evenings, though I was certainly flagging by the time I got back to my hotel. These one off gigs are possibly more tiring than doing a few in a row as the driving (even being driven) does take it out of you, so maybe I should have done a few more runs of two or three gigs in the same area. But fuck it. It's not like we need any more of these things. I will be back at the Lowry in June for Can I Have My Ball Back? Join the mailing list to find out where I am going and be able to book tickets first!
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