It was a fractious drive down to Whitstable this evening. I had a meeting in town first, but drove there, so was able to set off for the Kentish seaside town at 4pm. It's only a little bit more than 100 miles away, but we didn't arrive until 7.40pm. Getting across London on a Friday evening is an unpleasant experience and I was tired and frustrated by the time I finally parked up in a car park that rather charmingly was charging me 20p to leave my car there til 8.30am if I wanted. I considered gambling on the fact that no traffic warden would be patrolling at this time of night, then I could have kept my 20p and spent it on.... nothing much. But I decided not to be reckless and to let the Whitstable people fleece me. A family in Whitstable can live for a week on 20p, so I should not begrudge them their bounty.
I actually managed to fall asleep in a chair in the dressing room whilst the first half of the show played itself out, drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes waking on the big laughs, sometimes incorporating them into whatever scenario my old man's brain was dreaming up. I constantly forget that the driving is the hardest part of this job, especially when you're struggling in slow moving traffic, with the rain pouring down and your windscreen fogging up, so you constantly have to put the heaters on, until the electric warmth becomes unbearable and you give yourself some respite from it, until the windscreen fogs up again. Luckily for once I hadn't drunk a litre of diet coke at the start of the journey and didn't have the added discomfort of urgently needing the toilet, but to add to the fun both my headlights have again burned out, lasting
little more than a year this time. It was nice to have the added sense of danger of death or arrest or manslaughter of some sappy pedestrian or cyclist who had failed to dress brightly enough.
I felt like a right old doddery twat, snoozing in a bright dressing room in an uncomfortable chair and the gig felt slightly unreal as a result, though it went very well, from what I recall, but there's a chance that I am recalling the dream gig I had in the dressing room and the laughs I was getting were actually those of Matt Green and Matthew Crosby. Who is to say what is a dream and what is real life? Maybe real life is the dream and the dreamscape is real life? Though that seems unlikely. And means life would make even less sense than it does already.
But the gig did seem like a dream because before too long I was back in the car, pushing through heavy, nasty rain that came at my windscreen almost horizontally, illuminated in the weak glare of my sidelights on full beam.
There was quite a surreal moment when I became aware of a voice on the radio doing a very similar joke to mine about
Natasha Bedingfield's Baby song and was about to get cross, when I realised the voice was my own and I was listening to a trailer for That Was Then This Is Now. Matthew Wright laughed as the trail finished and said, rather surprised, "That was quite funny."
It wasn't until I was on the outskirts of London that it really struck me that I'd had a nice gig. It felt like I had been in the car all day, but there was this little bright oasis, that had hardly registered with me, when I had been standing on a stage, regaling the slightly shocked people of Whitstable with my stories of fellatio, anal sex and paedophilia. What a strange job.
I was saddened to hear that Evel Kenieval had died, but heartened that he had at least sorted out his
problems with Kanye West in the last week of his life. Hopefully his twin Good Kenieval is still out there, promoting sensible motorcycle riding, once again proving that good will always triumph over evil. So bear that in mind Satan. Why not give up being bad now and we can all relax?
