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Gloucester tonight at the Guild Hall and 140 so lovely audience members, which is acceptable (especially as I am also playing neighbouring Cheltenham on this tour). It suggests I am retaining my stand up audience, if not adding greatly to the numbers. But after six years away that still feels like a result.
It was a much more solid performance tonight, though problems with my clicker meant there were some technical issues, but it all just added to the fun.
My friend Ange had come to see the show. In the second year of University I shared a house with her and three other Occupational Therapist students. I'd met one of them on Camp America and she was at a college up on the hill, so I somehow ended up living with four young women at a college with mainly women, so the house was full of women, but I remained only of platonic interest to any of them.
Loser.
Ange was at the gig with one of her sons, very much a grown man and it made me feel a little bit sick to realise that it's approaching 40 years since her and I met. She looks exactly the same as she used to though and was sitting on the front row, and I directed a rude joke at her, before realising it was her which made me laugh. We went for a drink and talked about the old days and her experience of Covid (which working in palliative care was rather more terrifying and stressful than my little tussle with cancer and ventriloquism- maybe ventriloquism was the worst thing that happened to me in lockdown).
She mainly recalled my bedroom being messy and smelly and the fact that my main source of nutrients was toasted sandwiches (though I did cook more than she thought - lots of vegetarian bean dishes, which is partly why my bedroom smelled). My speciality toastie was to cut an onion into rings, put the bigger ones on the bread and crack an egg into them, then maybe a bit of cheese, toast it and a lovely toasted egg sandwich. I lived like a king.
We had a very nice friendship back then and though I haven't seen her much since (I bumped into in the street in Cheltenham a few years back), that mild piss-taking warmth was still there and the years peeled away, only to return with a bump every time I looked at her son. Where did he come from?
Then back to another country spa hotel - though we weren't allowed to use the spa at this one unless we paid another £25. Like most of these, it looked grand from the front, but once you got into the corridors and rooms you could see that nothing had been updated since shortly after I'd been at University. Not that it matters to us - it's just somewhere to sleep after having had the receptionist slightly looking down their nose at us.
I watched a couple of episodes of Baby Reindeer, because that's the law and went to bed late and woke up early as seems to be the tour way.
