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Finally the laborious effort of the months of filling up your cumpkins have drawn fruit (or seed). It’s Halloween. Wooooo!
People have started taking this thing really seriously in the UK in the last few years (if being frivolous can ever be serious). Twitter was full of pictures of people in very intricate make-up and costumes and the streets of Lancaster were crawling with harlequins and skellingtons (though apparently it’s always like that). It’s not like the old days where a few kid might put on a sheet and hope to get some sweets from their neighbours. Costumes everywhere. But ladies, word of advice re Halloween costumes, if I found cats sexy I'd have sex with a cat.... I just had sex with a cat. As you were.
It was much further from Loughborough to Lancaster than I imagined (I had assumed all the Ls would be kept close together - in any sensible system they would be). Even with George at the wheel it was a tiring journey, made worse by getting stuck in rush hour traffic in the middle of town with loads of diversions in place that the sat nav didn’t know about.
I thought this might lead to a tired performance, but it was one of the sharpest I’ve done in a while, though I was already at that point where the driving around had confused me about where I was. I was nervous about referring to the town in case I got the name wrong. And in my mind as I performed, Lancaster didn’t sound like a real place. I am glad I am not doing one of the relentless tours of a few years ago where I’d do 14 gigs in a row and then have a day off and then do 8 more. Spreading it all out over eight months in easy to digest chunks makes things a bit easier. And thanks to my decision to give in on the script, for a change I don’t have any major writing work to do in the daytime.
I couldn’t remember if I’d played Lancaster before - though apparently I was here two and a half years ago and fretting about getting older. What a bloody idiot. I am old now. I was so young then. I will never look back at this entry and think the same thing. I have no memory of that visit (the blog makes up for my malfunctioning brain cells) There were maybe slightly fewer people in tonight, but they were an excellent audience. Once again quality over quantity makes for a fun show.
Back at the hotel I decided not to go straight to my room for once and headed to the bar for a whisky, my first alcoholic drink of October (I vowed to stop drinking after getting ill in Wales in September). It was my mini Halloween celebration. I was dressed up as Charley Boorman. There was no one else around really so I wasn’t able to cause any havoc and blame it on him. The drink was OK for a sip or two, but ingesting a depressant to help me cope with a busy day and being away from home did not help things. So I ate some crisps and then some Rolos in the hope that they would get me out of my post-gig slump. But they made me less happy too. The loneliness of touring does not bore into my soul like a fracking fracking machine (as the crew of the Battlestar Galactica would call it) like it used to. I do not covet drunken nights on the town or heading out for a curry or the occasional company of a naked stranger as I did in my 20s. I am more or less used to the weird job I have, but the shift between the buzz of being on stage and the dullness of being in a mid-range hotel is still a little bumpy. Whisky and Rolos don't help. But a bit of Terminator 2 pinball does the job.
