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Still ill and it was a slightly trippy drive to Leek, a place in the UK that unusually I have never played before and even more unusually had never heard of before this gig was booked in. It seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, but quite a beautiful nowhere and we passed through rocky hills and fields so green they looked like they had been painted, with lambs sticking close to their mums as they tried to make sense of where the Hell they were and whether their life was really just all about eating grass. Was there some higher purpose to their existence? I wasn't going to tell them.
We were staying in a room above a pub tonight (another Bollings - I'm not going to be there so I don't give a fuck special) and we arrived early, hoping our rooms might be ready. The pub was busy and the barman said it'd be 20 minutes before we could get in. I thought I'd pop out and have a look at Leek, which seems like an OK place for a magical town that is on no maps and only appears once every a hundred years.
As I attempted to leave this tiny pub my way was blocked by a group of middle-aged men arriving. I waited by the door as five men came through, followed by five more, followed by five more. It was a huge group of balding men, who all knew each other, all determined to cram into this small space, none of them stopping to consider that there might be more room for them if they let the man with two bags out first. They kept coming in, bubbling with comments and attempted jokes. I don't know why so many similar men were all in one place at the same time - there was no women, no one younger than them. They kept coming. I don't know who many there were. Maybe a hundred thousand. They couldn't all get in. It took a good twenty of them to enter before they realised that this pub had only one two seater table available and very limited standing space and the landlord had to inform them that he couldn't accommodate this happy band of weirdly similar humans.
So suddenly the tide was reversed and I was now confronted with a couple of dozen men attempting to leave the establishment, laughing and commenting good-naturedly about there being no room in the inn. Not one of them paused to try and let me get out as well - it was a river of inoffensive men. It felt like I was in the middle of a comedy bit, but instead of clowns getting out of a small car it was greying good-natured bald men getting in and out of a small pub. In the end I just had to push my way into them to escape. I worried that I might get sucked into their orbit and be cursed to be in their gang forever. Perhaps this is how their numbers had swelled so much in the first place. Everywhere they went they magnetically pulled in another middle-aged man, until they got to a point where there was too many of them to ever be fed and watered and they had to turn on each other and fight to the death for sustenance.
I managed to escape like a meteor and shot off into the slightly weird town of Leek to find a sandwich I could stomach.
I came back to the pub to see if my room was ready and to have a nap, but drinkers were sitting on the street below right outside my room and I could only manage to drift in and out of a feverish dream.
Then I had to find some dinner and wandered the streets of Leek again trying to find anything that wouldn't make me more queasy. Not fish and chips, not a curry, not a horrible Lidl sandwich. Ultimately I had to go for the terrible option of a personal Dominos cheese and tomato pizza and some chicken wings. I was not happy about this choice but it's all my body could cope with. And even then the prospect made my stomach complain.
The man at the counter took my order and then searched for a deal to make the meal cheaper. He told me he'd saved me four pounds, charged me £21 and I tapped my watch against his card reader. Then I realised that that didn't sound like much of a saving for a small order (I'd also had a drink). Indeed totting up the prices on the list it seemed he'd added £4 to the bill.
I told him this, but he was insistent that the figure was correct, so we went through it and he realised he'd accidentally added another pizza to my order. I assumed he could just pay me back the £4 he now owed me, but he didn't have the authority for such a huge financial responsibility. He had to call his manager in, so I waited ten minutes for him to turn up, increasingly aware that show time was approaching and I didn't want to be burping up unpleasant pizza into the faces of the people of Leek.
The manager called me over and said he wasn't able to refund the money as he didn't have the authority to do that either, but said he could add a free pizza to my Dominos account for future use. But I don't eat pizza any more (you know unless I am ill and depressed and want to hurt myself) and I certainly wasn't that keen to eat a Dominos pizza, especially if they don't trust their staff to give tiny refunds for their own mistakes (what if, as unlikely as it seems, someone is dissatisfied with their purchase?) So I insisted on getting the money back.
I had to wait another 5 minutes in which time the guy behind me had suggested he shoot me £4 over to my phone and he got the free pizza. But the wheels were in motion and I wanted my money back.
The manager talked to his regional manager and was given the authority to put the money back on my card and only then was my order put through. In hindsight I wished I'd just paid the extra.
Ten minutes later I ate my sad meal sitting in at a Dominos takeaway on a plastic seat, trying to avoid the evening sun shining through the window, having won back my £4 but having paid £17 for the privilege and wasted 30 minutes. It struck me that I also hadn't had the £4 discount that I'd initially been promised..... I decided to let it go.
If you thought that touring was glamorous and sexy then I hope this blog is correcting your assessment.
An ill man who doesn't eat pizza, eating a pizza in a town he's never heard of. This is what it's like on tour.
It might just be my tours though. I think some other people in showbiz are a bit more rock n roll and get up to all sorts. I did have a Lemsip yesterday.
The gig was great though. A rare sell out, in a small room, but still double the audience I got in the much bigger city of Lincoln. And the people of Leek were well up for it and enjoyed me taking the piss out of them and mainly promised not to burn me in a wicker man.
I didn't go for a drink for the second night in a row, but watched the latest Beyond Paradise on my laptop.
Death can not come soon enough.
