I was heading back to Cheddar for a couple of nights more charity work. It is embarrassing how much I do for charity, it really is, but at least someone is earning some money from all this crap I am up to!
Tonight I was hosting an auction for the Cheddar Youth Trust, which might be a paedophile ring of some kind or it might be something that provides money for young people to pursue their ambitions. Either way it's a good cause. I last did an auction in Cheddar
back in 2005 and tonight ran in a very similar fashion, even down to half a dozen eggs going for much more than their market value (only £13 this time). I ended up bidding for the most expensive item, an oil painting of one end of Cheddar reservoir, showing one of the towers in the water that houses some part of the mechanism for water filtration (I am guessing). It was a pretty if odd picture. I couldn't imagine that anyone else would want this painting, but I fancied having it as it reminded me of all the times I used to run around this impressive body of water as a young man. But it turned out there was quite a lot of interest in the lot and the price shot up and up and it cost me £120 to secure it. I could have bought 60 eggs for that amount of money.
I had a lot of fun gently mocking my townsfolk and Cheddar itself. The first lot was to have 10 shirts ironed for free. "Someone in Cheddar has a new fangled invention - an iron - and is prepared to magically make your creased shirts smooth" I quipped. Luckily people laughed along.
I met my old English teacher Mr Litten at the event and he looked exactly the same as he had done twenty four years ago when he had last taught me. It had been a day of stepping back into the past as I'd spent an hour this morning trying to find posters and photos from school for tomorrow's gig - a final, final performance of "The Headmaster's Son" at the new King's Theatre at my old school. I finally found the posters in the bottom of a box, along with lots of other posters from various plays and comedy shows from University. I had what might be the only surviving copies of the sheets used to advertise early performances by Armando Iannucci, Stewart Lee and Al Murray. I wonder how much those would be worth to the discerning comedy fan.
There was also a pack of photos of some early 80s house party, at Geoff Quigley's gaff - his parents used to conveniently go away for the weekend quite often and we had quite a few boozy and debauched evenings. One of the photos taken through a doorway shows a kiss from over a quarter of a century ago, between two teenagers with big eighties hair and ridiculous eighties clothes. The decor of the room seems ludicrously old fashioned. I took the photo, presumably partly out of jealousy as I failed to pull anyone myself. How strange to find this moment in time preserved. I don't think the two kissees are together still, though I am pretty sure I know who they were. There's something a little bit poetic in the image, both in terms of what is happening in the picture and in the head of the photographer. Captured and yet lost.
Ah nostalgia. It feels likely that this is going to be a weekend for that.
