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Saturday 4th February 2023

7367/19887

A little taste of touring today as I drove to Wolverhampton for their literature festival - an annual even where all the people of that town gather in the shopping centre to look at a copy of Fiesta that was found under a bush and try to decipher the weird squiggles that accompany the glamour shots.
I am implying that no one in Wolverhampton can read.
Not really implying it, so much as stating it.
I am joking of course. Well over 20% of people who live there can now read to the standard of an average 7 year old.
It’s so long since I’ve driven round the country that I had forgotten which service stations to avoid. I stopped half way to Wolves, at Watford Gap services, hoping that this time I might catch a glimpse of the elusive gap and find out why it was so far away from Watford. 
Mark Steel would later call my decision a schoolboy error on Twitter, but I haven’t toured for over 3 years and I don’t usually stop so soon on the M1. I just wanted to buy a nice sandwich, but there was no Pret or M and S or Waitrose. It was like stepping back into the 1970s or spending an afternoon in modern day Loughborough. There was just a Costa, a Macdonalds and a cafe with very dodgy looking fayre and some closed phone shops and toilets that looked like they hadn’t been upgraded since 1982. It was a sad and miserable place that made me think that perhaps the Watford Gap is a spiritual condition that you experience by being here. It’s so bad you yearn to be in Watford. And the gap is the massive chasm between you and that fairly depressing town.
I decided to do a wee, wash my hands in the weird steel communal circular sink and press onwards and find my lunch in Wolverhampton. Which is, you have to admit, the actions of a desperate man.
I was in the mistaken belief that you had to get to the Fringes of the country before you found service stations as basic as this one, but my cosmopolitan prejudices were confounded by finding this awful shit hole that dripped in sadness and failure so close to London that it was named after Watford. Which remember, it isn’t very near.
Why would anyone stop here twice? Only because it had been many years since they had stopped here and had forgotten or hoped that things would have been updated. Come on Watford Gap, give yourself a chance. The smart Twitter money was on the new services at Rugby which are supposedly amazing. You have to contend with that. Either shape up or give in or open as a tourist attraction to show people how we used to live, with unemployed actors playing people like my grandad, being aghast at a round of 6 cups of tea costing 50p and a young Richard Herring thinking that the massive sugar shakers contained salt and then pouring that on his chips and crying when he realised what he’d done.
Wolverhampton wasn’t too much of an upgrade. I wandered the city centre looking for somewhere to eat, but there was a football match about to start and so a lot of others doing the same.  I was wearing a new coat that it a bit businessy and a woman turned to gawp at me as I passed, like she couldn’t believe the airs and graces I was putting on. But then look at my service station snobbishness. She wasn’t far off.
The chat about the book happened in Wolverhampton Art Gallery, which is a one room basement underneath a pub with some of the pictures from the copy of Fiesta torn out and stuck to the wall with sellotape. 
Not really Wolverhampton - it’s a very impressive gallery and I was interviewed in a beautiful room filled with dazzling old art. Gingerbeard Mark interviewed me (I remarked that his parents had had foresight in naming him) and I believe he’ll be putting the chat up on his podcast feed. It was a very enjoyable and spiralling conversation in which I managed a passionate defence of the NHS. But that’s pretty easy when they’ve saved your life.
I had hoped to get home by the kids’ bed time but the departing football fans meant that I couldn’t get my car out of the car park for an hour and I trundled home in the dark, feeling a bit tired and remembering why touring can be hard. I finally stopped for a wee and some dinner at Newport Pagnell services, having eschewed the Watford Gap and the other Roadchef one. And though there was a Waitrose there, the facilities were in a pretty sad state, especially the bridge across the Motorway which seemed to be stuck together with tape and had nearly all the windows blocked up and an uneven floor so you felt you might fall through on to the road below at any second. Maybe service stations are all shit. Don’t tell the 7 year old me. Even after his experience with the sugary chips he wanted to stop at every single one.

All joking aside, the Wolverhampton Literature Festival is a wonderful event and the audience were terrific, so congratulations to Phil Turner and the team for another fabulous event. I've gigged a lot in Wolves over the years and Phil has been the common factor in all those gigs and continues to bring great events to his city. The locals should be proud of him and may well be one day if they evolve to experience that emotion.
 
More great guest news for RHLSTP. Joe Cornish will be joining me for his first solo appearance on 20th Feb - Book quickly to get the cheaper tickets. Should have the other guest name early next week. 


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