Two festivals, seven hours of driving, four hundred miles. But first I had to pack everything I needed for Edinburgh.
I decided to try and view today as an adventure, rather than a burden and the psychological shift pretty much worked. I would only be doing 70 minutes of actual work, but I had a lot of driving and the logistics of making it to both gigs in time made it tougher. Both gigs were festivals which can often take time to both find the right place to be and to get into. But any kind of traffic jam or hold up and I was going to be pretty much screwed.
I got to Lounge in the Park in Canterbury in good time, but my sat nav brought me within a whisker of the festival, but alas they had instituted a one-way system that meant I had to follow complicated instructions and take a 15 minute detour. I had been promised a parking space close to the entrance, so that delays in leaving would be minimal, but once I was in the right place I was directed to general parking which was a good walk away from the festival entrance. I was also instructed that I would have to pay £10 to park there. I explained I was an act and they asked if I had my wrist-band. I said that I didn't as I had been directed here and they told me that they would refund my tenner if I returned with the wrist-band later. I was sceptical. There was a man taking the money and a supervisor in a landrover near by. "We will be here until 11pm," they told me. "Remember this guy" the money-taker said to the supervisor as he placed my tenner in bag hooked to the gate. I was sceptical, but I didn't really have time to argue.
Predictably my wrist-band was not at the main entrance and I had to walk for ten minutes around the perimeter of the festival in the blazing sun to get to the artist accredition. It was not about 40 minutes until I was due on stage and I was starting to worry. Ten minutes later I was standing at the back of quite a long queue of performers and guests all waiting for their wristbands and wondering if I was going to make it in time as well as fretting about the fact that I was going to lose 15 minutes getting back to my car. Luckily after another ten minutes the people in front let me jump the queue and although nobody seemed able to tell me where the comedy tent was. I passed a drunk man stumbling around in the back stage area with a member of staff trying to convince him he wasn't allowed to be there. Eventaully I found the venue with a few minutes to spare.
The front row was all tiny children, but I didn't let that stop me and aside from giving them my "What's brown and taps at your window? A poo on stilts" joke, I made no concessions. That joke seemed to upset a 2 year old boy in the front row and I agreed with him that it made no sense. He seemed on the edge of tears as I chatted to him. I have never made an audience member cry in the first minute of a gig before. It was powerfully hot, but I gave a boisterous performance, before making the long walk back to my car. I didn't want to risk getting lost so escehewed a possible short-cut. I passed the drunk man, now hand-cuffed in the back of a police car. He was having a more stressful day than me. But at least he was drunk.
Eventually I got back to the gate where I had been promised a refund, now with my wristband, but was unsurprised to see that neither the man or his supervisor were there now. There was just a young woman doing the job. What were the chances that she would have been told that I was getting my money back? Zero. I didn't really have time to hang around, but I thought I might just try, but as I approached the gate the woman was distracted by a car trying to access the field via the wrong entrance. She walked over to the car to remonstrate with the driver, who was insisting that she'd been in already and that all would be fine. It was another delay and I thought about leaving. But then I remembered about the money bag on the gate. I looked into it and could see a couple of hundred pounds in tenners staring back at me. One of the tenners was legally and rightfully mine, but I knew that getting it back would either be impossible or take more time than I had to arrange the return of. The woman taking the money had her back to me. Could I just "nick" my own tenner and be on my way? What if I was caught? Would I end up in the back of the same police car as the drunk man? That might delay my journey further.
On the other hand, it was my tenner and I had been wilfully lied to by the men who had taken it and it wouldn't be hard to argue that they had essentially stolen it from me with their lies. It was a moral maze and a stupid risk to take, but I was annoyed at being duped and about being made to lose half an hour of my day already with unnecessary walking and the woman had her back turned. I retrieved my tenner and went on my way. Feeling like a bank robber, but one who had had the bank stolen from him in the first place.
The woman was lucky, because had I been a less honest man I could have made a good profit on the day and taken all of her money. It did, I considered as I walked away, make quite telling evidence that I was only interested in taking what was mine. Any real thief would have taken the whole bag (which might have had thousands of pounds in its compartments). I had done nothing wrong, but I felt like I had. My only regret was that the lying men who had taken my tenner in the first place would still think that they had perpetuated a scam on me. At the end of the day they would be lying on a bed festooned with tenners thinking that one of them was mine. But it wouldn't be. I had it back,
I am a like a two modern-day Robin Hoods. Stealing money that is mine and then giving it to me.
As I drove past the woman I had sort of stolen from I considered stopping and seeing if my assumption had been right by asking for my money back and seeing what she said. Maybe I had got it all wrong and strict instructions had been left for my money to be returned. But I didn't see how. She couldn't give ten pounds to everyone with a wristband. I decided not to waste any more time and got on my way to Stockton.
The drive was long, but uneventful and six hours later I was at my second festival of the day. Again I had been directed to the wrong bit and no one in the production office knew who I was. I said that I was closing the stage I was on and they asked which stage. Not knowing how big the festival was I said, "I am on the main stage, I think," meaning the main comedy stage. "So you're following Primal Scream," said the woman with a wry smile on her face. "Oh, no. I don't think so," I replied. She gave me a wristband anyway and for the second time in a day I was off blindly looking for the comedy venue at the festival. Luckily in this case there only seemed to be two possible venues. The main stage or a small tent.
I had over an hour before I was on, so I could relax. And the gig went fine, though after my 45 minutes was up my legs felt heavy. My three cousins and one of their sons (is he my second-cousin) were in the crowd, so i caught up with them, but didn't have much energy left for conversation, so found my way back to my car and then found my way back to my hotel and crashed out.
I had got through my four gigs in 26 hours and only committed one crime (if you don't count speeding as a crime - not that I had done that, obviously).
