As often happens on tour I could picture the venue that I was performing at in Folkestone tonight and could even recall the people who worked there and that they'd given me a KitKat on my rider last time. But when we arrived I found I was thinking of somewhere entirely different. I can't remember where.
I had played the actual venue I had arrived at just two years ago (it was on the date of Harold Camping's last day of the world and I believe the fire alarms went off), but it still all seemed unfamiliar.
Touring gives you a nice foretaste of what life with dementia will be like. I am becoming overwhelmed by its strong waves and I shall allow myself to drown quite happily. I don't know where I was last week, I don't know where I'll be tomorrow. I have no idea where I am right now.
I should be just shipped around in a crate and unpacked on to the stage at show time, turned to face the audience and I will just crack on with the spiel. I don't know if it even makes any sense any more. I may not even actually be going anywhere, just imagining all of this from a padded cell.
I wish I had the imagination to envisage bigger audiences. But I got a big grab bag of Maltesers on my rider, which made up for it not being the place where they give me a KitKat (wherever that is). I meant to save half the bag for Giles and even stopped when it looked like 50% of the chocolates? Maltesers had gone. But then I thought I'd just have one more, he'd never notice (unless he had weighing equipment with him) and then I had another. I thought one more wouldn't be noticed by him and then took the chance of taking another. And by then there were so few Maltesers in the bag that I thought it might actually look a bit rude to give them to him. It would look like an after thought, that I thought I was worth three quarters of a bag of Maltesers and he was worth a quarter. I didn't want to insult him like that. So I quickly ate the rest to spare him the indignity. Also he's trying to lose some weight so I was doing him a favour.
It would have all worked too if I hadn't already mentioned that I had been given Maltesers and announced my intention to eat them all.
The imaginary audience filled half the auditorium (pity the paucity of ambition of my psyche) and they looked like they were enjoying it. But as they were possibly just cartoonish faces that I had drawn on the walls with my own excrement then that doesn't mean too much.
We got home around midnight. My wife was watching a film that we'd got on Lovefilm that neither of us remembers ordering and which has sat unwatched in the house for three weeks. It wasn't a film I had heard of before it arrived. It was called "Untouchable" and it's French and it is pretty fucking brilliant. I was tired and not really interested, but the story of a wealthy quadriplegic man being cared for by an ex-criminal. Handled badly or made by Hollywood it could be a terrible disaster, but it was engaging to see a story that relied on brilliantly written characters and fantastic acting. It's funny and it's moving and it has much to say about disability and social inequality. And it proves my dictum that if a man is shaving off a beard he will always go down to a Hitler moustache. See it now before someone remakes it with American actors and ruins it. Everyone in this film is perfect for it. It's some of the most enjoyable and impressive acting that I can remember seeing. Check out the trailer
here.
And for those of you who listen to the podcast version of this blog you will be delighted to hear that Simon Mann has found proof that Terry, my editor, has been doing his job properly (despite some malicious claim to the contrary). It's all the bits edited out of the podcast spliced together. It's embarrassing how many mistakes I have made. Thank God that Terry is on hand to snip out these errors.
Listen to them here. And thanks to the unsung hero Terry. You know he's done a good job when you don't realise he's done anything at all.
