Tour Diary

October 2005

Threadbare tour diary I know. But it's a start. I've jotted things down here and there and then lost them, or they're private, but also I am pretty vacant. I tend to stare out the train window for long hours becoming as cheerily brainless as the cow in the field or the businesspark on the floodplain.

Another reason the tour diary is smaller than its intro is that in readying these pages for electronic internet publication I am haunted by the following question, will my posting be good enough to actually get on the web? One becomes nervous at the prospect of making the cut. I've never actually checked out the Information Superhighway myself but the fearful reputation of its Algonquin Table of literary editors precedes it. Will I pass this stern panel of judges and artistic directors whose quality control has set the bar rather too high for many of us to get a look-in on the internet? Here's hoping!! If you're reading this then I have!

Swindon Wyvern 10 October

I learn the difference between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission in 'New Internationalist' whilst scoffing my pack-lunch in the Swindon Wyvern dressing-room during Mark's set. I now fantasize about this question of their difference coming up in pub quizzes or conversation. Ah, well, it's really rather simple, the deuterium and the tritium, you see, are heated .... etc., etc." But then even this contrivance isn't enough. I remain unsatisfied unless my interlocutor goes away with the unshakeable impression that not only do I know loads about the subject, these findings are the results of amateur lab work done by me in my own private laboratory, a place often visited by leading members of Royal Acadamy and by the Chief Scientific Officer when they've drawn a blank.

Sheffield City Hall 11 October

Travelled up to Sheffield with my friend Nora Meyer on the train. Her documentary about the Bethnal Green & Bow election is being shown at Sheffield documentary festival.

I wander about alone down Wicker way searching for itchy hoop cream and sore-throat pastilles and rehydration salts.

To stop pigeons settling on Edward VII opposite Primark, the dead king's statue has a dense double-row of spikes sticking up from his sceptre and spikes in the toecap of his boots. King Ted looks like he's carrying a studded baseball bat, the Daddy of them all. This neatly fits the latent aggression in his face and stance.

Down by the market, Sheffield is so run down and there are so many people with, it seems, nothing, that I do not know what will happen here when there is a sharp financial collapse which makes things worse for those for whom the economic 'boom' made things no better.

What will a short season of brownouts bring? If this is what it's like now, how will it be with no energy?

Nora comes to see the City Hall gig and says that since the Tricycle Theatre gigs my act has become like a Medicine Show. This observation makes me happy.

Going to Glasgow

Sitting on the train, listening to the White Album. But it's a Virgin train so I'm going to get off at York and look for a GNER. Virgin train carriages have this nasty chemical niff, which stings my eyes. I don't know what it is. I imagine poly-chlorinated-biphenyl-type fibres (although not actually those of course) floating from treated friable tissue paper. Tiny irritants held aloft in invisble hot-air balloons, floating free from dust in the cheap seats, or from cleaning agents, as Satan uses his bearded plenipotentiary to drive people onto His Very Own Motorway.