Nipping down to the Co-op this evening to get a bottle of milk, I ran into Eileen who was heading to the public notice board. I guessed she was going to read the weird open letter our former doctor has posted there...

(Back story: there has been a long, growing rift* between our former GP and the GP who replaced him. As Merriol works for the new GP, and we count her as a friend, and as I have no idea what I have been told, in confidence as a friend, and what is public knowledge, I'm not going to go into the finer details, but this open letter put up on the public noticeboard is certainly making people think about the affair in a whole new light.)

So, (Get to the point!) Eileen was indeed going to read the notice but couldn't because of the poor light...

(More back story: the noticeboard down at the Co-op was cunningly constructed so as to be in total darkness after sunset and in midwinter the sun sets mid-afternoon around here. The overhanging roofy bit of the notice board which shelters you from the rain (on the rare occasions the rain comes straight down as opposed to sheeting in horizontaly which is the norm) also completely shades out the streetlight on the other side of the road. The thing was also cunningly placed right next to where the trucks delivering to the Co-op have to reverse round a tight corner and has been semi-demolished at least twice.)

Ilene couldn't read the notice so I backed up the car and switched on my headlights so she could see.

None of which is got anything to do with what I started out to say. What I started out to say was, as we were chatting, Ilene asked me how the 'dirty weekend' had gone and the first thought that popped into my head was "Didn't you read the blog?"

I need to get out more and socialise face to face and do real talking to people.




*'rift' as in Great Rift Valley

test of new PFF installation...

Edit: ...which obviously works.

PFF = Performancing For Firefox, which is the sit at the bottom of the window blogging tool I've been using for a while but, after I foolishly upgraded it, it stopped (and there you have me and computers in a nutshell).

Now someone has fiddled with something somewhere and it's up and running again. For which I am grateful. Thank you anonymous World Wide Interweb people for your tireless fiddling, and for making at least one of my Firefox extensions work again.

Not much exciting happened today so I drew a cartoon.

I'll get my coat...

Blah day. Cold but beautiful. It snowed heavily last night and there was snow down to the tree line. Dead calm this morning and a high tide. Real picture postcard weather.

It was one of those days in which nothing much seemed to get done. We went shopping in Oban and filled the car up with stuff from Tesco, Lidl, a couple of charity shops and home again, put the kids to bed and watched a movie. Well, started to watch one, got so pissed off with it we junked it and I fetched another off the impressive (in size, not content) 'Movies we have not yet watched' heap,

On the way down to Oban Merriol texted Morag to see if she wanted anything. Morag did, and because the kids were playing up and it was getting late I was delegated to run round Lidl and get the stuff for her. Have you ever tried to do someone else's shopping? I found it totally confusing.

Morag had asked us to get things we don't normally buy. It's very odd how quickly you get into ruts. I go into Lidl buy umpteen things, but they're always pretty much the same things. I notice new lines when they appear on the shelves but somehow I manage to tune out all the other stuff that has always been there that I don't normally get, so when I was asked to purchase some of this stuff I had somehow trained myself not to see - I just couldn't find it.

I thought I knew where everything was in the store (it ain't that big after all) but I just couldn't find the stuff she wanted us to get till I had walked past it five times and then asked one of the few and far between downtrodden workers. It was a very unsettling experience.

I Know! I Know! But My Legs Don't Understand.

An interesting day.

I cleaned poo off a carpet, bathed one of my kids, wiped milk off the stairs, mopped up a puddleful of water off the kitchen floor, and scraped gobbets of congealing porridge off the table - and all before nine in the morning.

In the afternoon I got offered the lead roll in a movie.

The movie is a lo-lo-no budget thing and it's five minutes long but "If you're interested the lead role is yours" are words every actor dreams about. Especially if it gets me out of wiping Daisy's arse for a few days.

In the evening Merriol and I took ten minutes to track down the rightful owner of the lost camera, a feat about which, we will have great fun telling the nice policewoman who has had the thing for the past three months. (Actually I will let Merriol tell you about that on her blog tomorrow as it was her brilliant deductive powers that broke the case - too much Miss Marple if you ask me.)

---

I found a pedometer of the kitchen floor during the morning (where does this stuff COME from?) . I zeroed it and clipped it on my belt.

I just took it off. It read 12753.

According to this site that is about six miles. I'll believe that. Most of it up and down stairs. No wonder I'm buggered at the end of the day.

---

Oh, and it snowed.

I Wish You Could Open Up Sunshine To See What's In It

I spent the greater chunk of today varnishing and assembling a couple of Ikea storage box things we bought on our shopping orgy in Glasgow. How sad is that by the way - I mean the fact that going shopping in Ikea is a big treat for us? This trip we did make the serendipitous discovery that going round Ikea on Friday night is a good idea. The place is practicaly empty. Most of the population of Scotland spends Friday night getting themselves plastered, or in hiding from those that are, not wandering around warehouses full of flatpack lifestyles. Sunday afternoon on the other hand, we went back to buy some things we decided we couldn't live without) and the place was packed, a nightmare - full of families with kids all moving at 0.1 miles per hour pushing huge fucking trolleys empty apart from a funky plastic toothmug and a £4 table lamp plonked in the middle. Beats going to church I suppose.

Anyway. These little wooden trunky things: wooden cubes made of open little wooden slats. Half way through shellacing them I was really starting to regret it but the thought of trying to clean felt pen or paint off totally untreated wood was even worse so I finished. It was one of those so boring it becomes hypnotic / addictive jobs. After the shellac had dried (which wasn't long, one of the nice things about shellac is that it dries very quickly and doesn't stink the house out, unlike polyeurathane) I assembled them and found myself the proud possessor of another two dinky little Ikea's self-assembly double ended Allen keys. There's one in every Ikea bit of Ikea Flatpack furniture. I have dozens of the buggers in my workshop. One of these days I will find a use for them (other than dismantling Ikea furniture) I will, I will. That or someone in Ikea will finally realise the scrap value of these things and start placing little boxes in every store for you to dump them in so they can be melted down to make 'Snott' kitchen roll holders or something equally weirdly named.

(Typing Snott and Ikea into Google gets 18,100 results... just in case you were tempted).

This evening, interrupted only by letting my family thrash me at Scrabble, I will be listing stuff on eBay. It's a chaepo day on Thursday and we need the cash now that I am not working again. We also need the space, given my predilection for buying crap (I only bought 14 CDs last week). This will be the first chance I have had to sell anything for a while, what with one thing and another and I am totally confused by the new postal regime. Until a few months ago the Post Office would charge you by the weight of your letter or parcel.

It weighs X grammes? You pay Y pence.

Simple. Easy.

It got a little more complicated when you took into account weight limits for different classes of postage. If an item was too heavy to post First Class it had to go either Parcel Post or Second Class. (Or was it the other way around?) But it was livable with. Like I said; easy.

Then, for some reason known only to themselves, they changed it. Not only do you now have to know how heavy something is but how big it is too. If it measures this by that and will slip through the handy plastic slot on the counter it will be charged at one rate, but if it this by that and won't go through the slot, then it's charged at another higher rate. If it is within a different, larger set of this by that's, and still goes through the slot, then it's another rate - and then there's a third set of measurements... after which I have no idea. They probably make you saw the thing in half and post it in pieces.

It is utterly confusing.

Time was, I used to be able to shove a heavy book in a jiffy bag, heft it in my hand, and think - 'that feels like about £2 worth of postage'. Now I have no idea.

Nor does anyone else.

I'll have to take everything down to the Post Office, see if it shoves through the slot, get it weighed, and have it priced before I can list it. It's stupid. I heard one Post Office official on the radio saying it was a system that worked well in Holland. That explains a lot. It was probably invented one Friday night by two stoned postal workers in an Amsterdam dope cafe and scribbled on the back of a napkin. Made perfect, almost mystical sense at the time, but in the cold light of day....?

I wonder if Dutch Ikeas are busy on Friday nights?

The Job is over and I am now gainfully unemployed. Hurrah! Full time house-husbanding again.

The day the job finished Merriol and I buggered off to Glasgow for a weekend without the kids. Posh Hotel - lots of shopping, not being woken up at 3.30 am by Daisy demanding a story.

Heaven.

Realising on the first night that I forgotten to take a book with me. No so Heavenly.

How can I have forgotten to take a book with me? I cannot normally move without at least one book somewhere within reach (on the Ferry over to Islay last Thursday I shoved three in my pockets before we set off (and this was five in the morning! I was hardly able to walk! let alone make thinkings) Toothbrush. Books. It's automatic; it's instinctive. I can't function without a book to read but, more importantly in this case, I can't sleep without a book to read. Something about the rhythm of the eye movements while reading is very hypnotic. So there I was, stuck in a hotel room wide awake, Merriol snoring away by my side. Nothing else to do, I plugged my walkman earphones into the socket in front of the bedside telly and flipped through the available channels. I landed on an interesting program about the late, great Ivor Cutler. After that finished I flipped on through the channels pausing only to wonder why anyone would want to watch cricket or wrestling at two a.m. when I discovered the - Free Porn Channel.

Woohooo!

I had a real Joey Tribbiani-like moment. Cooool, free porn!

Just a moment.

Dear God! save me from the badness of British Porn. The highlight of my brief stay on the channel was watching a well-endowed young lady bring herself to a 15 minute (OK, it wasn't that brief a stay) fake orgasm that made Meg Ryan's Harry Met Sally one look understated. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Ah! Ah! Oh! ah AOOOH! AH!!! AHAHAHAAAH! Oh! Oh! OH! - and on and on and on she went and she didn't stop chewing her gum for one single second!
Chewing gum? Who the hell chews gum while having sex? Even with yourself?
What I found even more amazing was that her relentless chewing didn't match any other visible on-screen rhythm. Various parts of this naked woman were oscillating at various interesting speeds and in various interesting directions as she Oh! Oh! Oh!ed away at herself and yet none of them matched her chewing at all. It was fascinating. It was like watching a jazz drummer keeping some bizzare beat going. Did Gene Krupa write sex manuals? (Insert your own joke about paradiddling yourself here, I am not going to stoop so low.)

It was incredible. It was like she was lap dancing a Dave Brubeck number: Take Five or Unsquare Dance. It was the second best bit of acting I had seen all week.

The first best bit of acting I saw all week was, without doubt, me acting my way through the first part of the show on Islay despite being in some considerable pain. What happened was this:
The third scene of the show had me pretending to be 5 years old and throwing a tantrum because I couldn't get the toys I wanted. Thursday, it being the last show, I thought I would go all out and really throw the tantrum to end all tantrums. If Bob could overact mercilessly, why couldn't I? I worked my way up to it fine, got the dialogue out, built myself up with frustrated anger - then let rip, I jumped up and down, whined in the annoyingly high pitched sulky winge, thrashed my clenched hands around like I had done forty odd times before only this time I pulled out all the stops and really went for it - and whacked myself right in the testicles with my fist.

I managed to punch myself in the balls.

Stop laughing; it was agony!

The next few minutes were insanely hard work, acting as if nothing had happened and carrying on with the banal banter that followed, when all I really wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cuddle my nads - I must have been good because no one else noticed anything was wrong. I love actors. We're so sensitive.

Too Pooped to Blog

Not enough time free this weekend to do anything other that apologize for the lack of gripping installment this week.

And what a gripping installment it would have been too.

... trapped by landslides and fallen trees in a small one street highland town with nothing to do but read (I was paid to sit about and read all day. How brilliant is that?)

... drove for hundreds of miles and endure long ferry trips, to take the kids to Tobermorey, a town famous for being the location of a favourite kid's TV show, Ballamorey, and which smelled like a seaside bus station; that strange damp mixture of fish offal and diesel which you only find in fishing ports.

... endured the most awful bit of 'table wetting' ever in the history of crap service in the UK catering industry.

... sat in the pub for hours at the pub quiz and discovered the third unforeseen consequence of the smoking ban. Until this year all pub tables had ash trays. Now they don't. There is no where for anyone to dump the crumpled up bus tickets, chewing gum wrappers, old toothpicks etc etc.

... deleted twenty three million spam and got my email working again.

If I get a chance I will expand on all these and more next week.

The Stand-up From Porlock

It is a fact universally recognised that ripping off Jane Austen is a rotten way to start a blog entry but it is also true that within most people there is a frustrated artist trying to get out. Even only if that inner artist manages to escape when the host body is utterly blootered, and turns out only to be interested in expressing themselves through the medium of Kareoke, there is an urge to create within all of us. My inner daemon is a frustrated stand-up comic. Every now and then he just pops up from nowhere, grabs my internal brain stage's mike, and starts riffing.

And he's brilliant.

He's Lenny Bruce and Bill Bailey and Dylan Moran all rolled into one, and funnier than the lot of them. (He sounds a bit like Dylan Moran too.) Trouble is that, on the rare occasions when he does turn up, he won't stop talking. I just have to listen to him because he is so funny. By the time he's finished I'm simultaneously wetting myself with laughter and hugging myself with glee because this is the funniest thing EVER and it CAME OUT OF MY HEAD and it's mine! Jesus, I'm so fucking funny! Two minutes later when I try to write any of it down - I can't remember a fucking word. Nothing. Not a sausage. It's gone; he's gone, and he won't come back and do it again. He does his whole act and then just fucks off leaving me with the memory of a great gig but none of the specifics.

It's really frustrating.

He turned up tonight while I was soaking in the bath. All I can remember is a long rant about wind turbines. Fucking wind farms. Everyone complaining about them ruining the scenery. His solution? Put them underground.

It made me laugh.

I think you had to be there.

I've Got a New Smile to Show You!

Tomorrow I pick up the car again to go back on the road with the play on Monday. Tomorrow I must pack for a week away in sunny B&B land and pick up my copy of the script and see if I still remember it.

Went to the pub last night. First time I have been for a very long time. In fact the first time all six of us Andy, Ilona, Eilene, Chaz, Merriol and myself have been in the boozer together since the last village panto ten months ago. Of the six of us, two are on the wagon, one is pregnant, one is on medication that precludes the imbibing of alcohol. I'm still trying to work out why we went to the pub.
Scotland has a total ban on smoking indoors, in any kind of workplaces and that includes pubs. Ireland beat us too it, and England are following relectantly behind. One of the more pleasant effects of this ban has been that you can now sit in a pub all night (not drinking and not smoking) and come home without having to strip off and shower because you reek like an ashtray.
Today was spent wandering the street of Fort William and another side effect became apparent. Scottish cafes have started putting out tables and chairs on the pavements (for the smokers) just like every other country in the world has been doing since drinking coffee and having a blether was invented. It was really nice just sitting at a pavement cafe watching the world go by. Oooh. Dead continental.

Naked Yoghurt

First of all the tedious length of today's blogging is because today is...

One Day In History... day

...and I'm going to post this there too. Though having got half way down the filling out the required details form and finding the pulldown "Where are you from" menu lists every county in England and Wales but just lumps the whole of Scotland as 'Scotland' I'm tempted to forget it. Fucking Southerno-centric bias. This is supposed to be the British Library after all.

My typical day by Liam aged 47, husband of Merriol, thirty-ahem!, and father to Holly, four, and Daisy two.

9 a.m. Breakfast of coffee (Lidl's finest brewed to a chewable consistency) and a handful of soggy Salt and Vinegar Pringles - I wanted to throw the tube away. Tea for Merriol, Tesco's ultra-cheapo. The kids have already raided the fridge and made themselves breakfast. Hate to think what, but there is cheese missing.

Started the washing machine going with the load I forgot to start last night, loaded the dishwasher, took a phone call with details of a tour date change. Opened the gates for Merriol to take Daisy to the Doctor's about the rash on her legs, brought in the milk (two pints full fat) . Started to drink the coffee and tidy up the kitchen. Merriol and Daisy returned from the doc's with a tube of 3 times a day steroidal gunk.

10 o'clock got the kids ready and trolled up the hill to playgroup while Merriol went off to work. 5 kids & 3 adults at playgroup.

Came home at mid day to find a female blackbird trapped in the hallway and a robin flying around in the living room. Finished my morning cup of coffee which was now three hours old and stone cold (there was no way I was going to let that much caffeine escape me) and eventually persuaded the birds to leave by managing to steer them through the open windows they were missing by inches. The kids meanwhile watched Yo-Ho Ahoy!

The Post arrived. 2 bits of junk mail, one computer cable bought on eBay, and a book from Amazon.

Lunch was Pasta a la Fridgese. Which today was tomatoes, palma ham, olives, and red pepper fried in olive oil.

Listened to You and Yours on Radio 4 while I cooked and said "wanker" a lot. I must stop shouting at the radio even if it is populated by smug southern gits.

1.20 p.m. Finished lunch and loaded dishwasher. Emptied washing machine. Holly helped (though for some reason best known to Holly we had to pretend to be policemen and communicate by Walky Talky as we did it). Hung laundry in the driving room . How can three people wear so much underwear in one week?

Holly played on her computer and Daisy dressed up as whatever Daisy thinks she is dressing up as when she rifles the dressing-up box. I nipped upstairs to check my mail. Deleted over 100 hundred Spam encouraging me to enlargen my penis, have multiple orgasms and "shoot my load" over 50 feet. (why?). Freeserve's spam filters have obviously gone on strike again.

Changed Daisy's nappy.

Got the kids all dressed up and into the big double pram to take them down to the library van in the village square. Stood there for ages. Library van did not arrive. Pushed them all the way back up the hill and called in on my parents with the loaf of bread my mum had asked me to buy. Daisy fell asleep on the way up so I left her sleeping in the push chair as I stayed for a cup of coffee and Holly danced the alphabet.

Home again. Put Daisy to bed. Not like her to sleep so long in the afternoon, but she was up at one a.m. and again at six. Continued the Sisyphean task of tidying the kitchen. Paused to brush Holly's hair (merely Herculean) and contemplated tea.

Tea evolved into corn on the cob followed by sausages (Morrison's best herby somethings) spuds, broccoli and salad. The girls, suspecting I would be writing this blog, ate the broccoli before the sausages! I sometimes wonder if they are really my kids.

6.30 went to lay down for half an hour and read a chapter of Larklight, Philip Reeve's latest Ripping Yarn. Jolly good it is too.

7 pm - 8 pm Bathtime and stories. Both kids went down like I had thrown a switch.

8 pm - 9 Blogging, Chuntering in forums (fora?) and trying to get Merriol's phone to talk to the computer via the new cable. (I finally admitted defeat and will have to read the manual).

9 pm-ish Watch some crap movie with space ships, large-breasted women, and explosions.

10.30 pm Wake Holly for a pee.

Somewhere between then and 3 am I will go to bed depends on how distracted I get by the web.

Those seagulls Are Falling Down

My first day's solo child looking after for 6 weeks.



I'm fucked.



It's HARD WORK!

Driving back from Oban this afternoon. Holly and Daisy were in the back pretending they were alarm clocks. I had to pretend to be asleep (while driving) and every few minutes, when they got fed up with saying "tick tock", they would make alarm noises and I would have to pretend to wake up.

After about the twentieth time of this, Merriol tried to head the game off into slightly less annoyingly repetitive territory.

Merriol:
Hurray! We're awake.
What's for breakfast?

Holly:
You tell me. I'm an alarm
clock not a fortune teller!

I wish I made this stuff up.

Unicorn Poo

Holly woke us up the other morning demanding she have a bath because a unicorn had pooed on her during the night.

"They are very small animals but do very big poos." she said.

We asked her why the unicorn had pooed on her and not in the toilet.

"Because it didn't want to disturb Daisy. Unicorns are the worst tip-toers in the whole world."

---

Merriol is going across country tomorrow to have a full day's pampering in a beauty spa place. A workmate of hers has a new boyfriend, firmly set on Impress Mode, who has stupid amounts of money to throw around. He bought her, "and a friend", a whole day's slap-up beauty workout in a posh slap-up beauty workout place.

Merriol is the friend.

He paid two hundred quid for EACH of them for the day.

Cough! Splutter!

That's some serious impressing going on there.

Merriol will be away all day and I get to play with the kids, feel vaguely inadequate, and practicing saying:

You look wonderful!

YOU look wonderful!

You LOOK wonderful...

...for when she comes back.

She's Gone Blind In The Ears And Can't Hear Very Well

Poking about in the counter again tonight (I'm supposed to be setting questions for the Playgroup's Pub Quiz but get distracted easily) I find that someone recently bumped into the blog while searching for 'mwahahahaha'. Why the hell would anyone be searching the web for 'mwahahahaha'only to find this? There are some very strange people out there. And I seem to be one of them.

Three weeks of the tour done and I'm home for the next two weeks before buggering off on the road for another three. The schools are on holiday for a fortnight and I am being paid a £100 retainer not to take a job in the meantime. Like the National Theatre is just HOUNDING me!

The tour has been a lot more fun that previous ones. A lot easier. I get on with the others and we seem to laugh at the same things but even so, after three weeks on the road this is a welcome break. I miss my kids. Daisy seems so much older, even after only a week away from her.

We spent the last week doing the schools in Morayshire We stayed the whole week in one Bed and Breakfast and drove to the gigs each day, returning to the B&B each night. The upside of this was we didn't have to pack up each morning and drive to a new place and get settled in again and find somewhere to eat etc. On the down side, Bob and I were sleeping in a windowless box. The owners of the B&B (the Willowbank in Elgin if anyone is interested) had obviouslyy measured their car and then measured the garage and thought: "We can get another room in that gap at the end". So they did. Walled off the end of the garage, knocked a hole through to the main house and called it a bedroom. It was appalling. No window, damp, cold. The roof was low and sloped. The bathroom was tiny and must have been plumbed in by a midget. (The shower head was about nipple height with no way of adjusting it any higher - you either had to sit on the floor, or shower one-handed. Not a skill I possess). We spent a lot of time staying out of the room.

The girls' room was OK but the place is no longer on the Theatre's approved list, not after Bob and I had our four pennies worth.

The shows have been fun too (especially the bit where Sarah wraps herself around me and tries to drag me off to bed - I quite enjoyed that bit) but the show has been getting longer and longer. As we have learned what works and what doesn't, and how to milk a laugh out of situations, it's grown about eight or so minutes. One of the things I have really learned this time is that sometimes audiences need time to settle into a joke. There's one line towards the end which always used to get a laugh last year but not a titter this time. It took me a good week or so to notice the joke was falling flat and a few days to work out what was killing it. It was just as simple as Claire coming in too fast with the next line. It made sense for her to come in quickly. It is how her character would react but by coming in so fast she didn't give the audience time to get the joke and laugh before their brains were being fed more information. All this may seem amazingly obvious but when you are doing it, franticly trying to remember your lines and which exit you are coming off next, thoughts like that tend to take some days to be completed. They are half-realized when the situation presents itself, then forgotten a moment later as a new problem turns up, half-realized again during the next show - and so on.

It really is a very strange process this acting lark. You stand there talking to another actor in front of a hundred or so people, saying these things that you have learned, thinking all the time about how you are saying them, making yourself believe you are saying them for the first time ever, and trying to think about what it is you are saying, and trying to make it real, while at the same time part of your brain is going:

Now what was that thing she does with her hand in the next bit? You meant to mention it to her after the show all last week butbutt forgot.. Ah, right! that was it! I must mention that to her afterwards... wait a minute! I've usually got the drink in my hand by now, why am I still standing here when I should be over there. He forgot that line again never mind turn around and walk off that way... I wonder where we'll get lunch today? I can'trememberr what the next scene is. Crap! I haven't got a clue! Fuck! Wait a minute! if I'm standing here... and Bob's over there... wearing the hat... then.... OK !I know what my first line is when I walk back on. Haven't got a clue what's after that but that's enough. It'll come back to me...

Anyway we seem to have added eight minutes of silence to a forty-five minute show and made it funnier as well. It does mean we have less time to do the workshop afterwards but that's hardly a tragedy. That never was much fun.

I jus hope I can rememberr ANY of it when we go back out in two weeks time.

Aha! This is genius! The best idea I've had since I attempted to make a solar-powered barbecue out of an old Sky satellite dish and some baco-foil. At least once a week I lose at least one of the remote controls required to drive the Telly/DVD/Skybox combo (the VHS remote died years ago and we just get on our hands and knees and try and remember what the buttons on the front used to do before the logos wore off. Luckily it is old enough to have buttons on the front). Last night I would have watched a movie that was playing on Film 4 but for the fact we had lost the TV remote and the set was jammed on the 4:3 aspect ratio while the film was being broadcast in 16:9. I can't stand watching films like that, with everyone squished up. When I go to the cinema it takes me at least three goes to get the right seat. Dead center with eye level in the centre of the screen if poss. Merriol just waits in the aisle till I have finished fannying around and have found the right spot. Then she joins me. The only way I could have watched the movie last night was to have stood on a stepladder and peered down at the screen from above. Not comfortable.

So tonight's genius idea. Everyone I know has at least three old mobile phones that they don't know what to do with. And when you misplace your mobile phone the simplest way to find it is to phone it from another phone and follow your ears. So...

Next time you can't find the remote, dial the outdated phone you have taped to it and there you are!

Gad! I'm so brilliant I scare myself sometimes.

Merriol just muttered the words 'sad git' and went to bed.

Sunday. Sarah is on her way up from Glasgow. We meet up and then drive to Fort William to pick up Bob, then rendez-vous with Claire 'somewhere on the A 96'. Then we drive for 2 hours through the more pictureque (though invisible in the dark) bits of the Highlands and arrive at our B&B at about Midnight. We do the show in Aberlour first thing in the morning, all 90 odd minutes of it - then drive all the way back again.

At least I get to sleep in my own bed 2 nights this week.

Chips are not Salad

Well that's week one done and dusted.

Dornoch, Kinlochbervie, Thurso, Wick and Golspie out of the way. 7 shows down fourtysomething to go.

One of the things I rediscover while touring is that, after a few days, I start to look at this place I live in like a total stranger. I become a tourist in my own country. And a very strange place it is too. For instance, I find the bizarre practice of table wetting really weird. It seems to happen in every place you sit down to eat these days (well any place that hasn't got tablecloths - and itinerant TIE actors can't afford to eat in places with fripperies like that). You walk, in sit down at the only available table, move the two empty cups and a plate with a half-eaten meal, left by the previous occupants, to the edge where the harrased staff can most easily get at it. You start perusing the menu. Don't care. As long as the coffee is OK anything with chips will do me.

Everyone has just about made up their mind what they want when one of the harrased staff comes and removes the dirty crockery, disappears without taking the order, then returns a few seconds later with a damp cloth. Everyone at the table picks up their newspapers, mobile phones or whatevers and the the harrased staffer wets the table. Just wipes the wet cloth over the table and disappears again. If you are unlucky they have a spray of noxious table steralising gunge that they sray on the table first which leaves a punge that lingers well into your meal and makes everything taste of hospital. And no one says a fucking thing. We just sit there and let them do it. Every time. Over the last week I have stared at more damp formica waiting for it to get dry enough to put my elbows back down than I think is good for any man. So fuck it. Next time I'm going to say 'No'. I don't want my table wetting. I don't mind having a few crumbs and a thin smear of, what I hope is, tomato ketchup on the table. Just go get me food.

Ballachulish is a wonderful place. I love it to bits but sometimes I regret not having moved somewhere more remote. Then I go there and change my mind. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure Kinlochbervie is a great place to live but I don't think I could handle the remoteness. I don't understand Kinlochbervie. It's a small cove in the middle of nowhere with a HUGE quay lined with sheds and vast numbers of refridgerated lorries outside. I guess they land fish there. The only other building is the brand spanking new High School (2nd worst acoustics of the tour) and that's it apart from a small hotel, a local shop for local people, and about 3 houses. Where do all the kids come from? Maybe they live in the sheds, or comute in by trawler, I don't know. The Fisherman's Mission does a good fish and chips though.

From there it was a 3 hour drive to Thurso along the worst A Road in Britain. 95% of it is single track with passing places and ocassional flocks of sheep and carloads of oncoming tourists. The sheep were usually smarter. Then onto Wick.

Wick wasn't as bad as last year but is still a depressing dump, and, after been stung by a wasp in the only pub in town that doesn't go quiet when strangers walk in or make you think of An American Werewolf In London and The Wicker Man, I was in my bed at 8pm sipping a cup of tea made on one of those stupidly small, 3 watt kettles that British hotels laughingly describe as 'tea making facilities' I lay there in a damp bed, half-reading trying not to listening to the boy racers mowing down pedestrians outside. Bob meanwhile watched some cop show on a 4" TV bolted to the far wall of our room with the sound down and the subtitles on. Life on the road is just great.

Next day Bob got stung by a (different) wasp during the show.

The weather was nice though.

Came home to find it had been bucketing down all week and there had been a huge landslide in the hill behind our house. So much rain that part of our neighbour's garden went for a walk.

More next week.

It's my birthday. Happy birthday me.

Fuck.

As of two and a half hours ago I'm forty-seven.

When he was my age Mozart had been dead for twelve years.

I need to start writing.


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