I had a gig last night near the Forest of Dean, sticking with my unintentional policy of only doing gigs this year in Gloucestershire. The only exception to this so far has been Bristol, which was part of Gloucestershire once upon a time.
I hadn’t heard from the promoter in about two months since the booking. So, I thought I’d better message him to find out if the gig was still on. It turns out, the gig was still on. But he’d forgotten I was booked. Fortunately, he still agreed to let me on.
It was a nice room and a really good turnout for late-ish July with about 20 in. In a small room, certainly felt much fuller. Probably at least half of my set was taken up with reading out extracts from Ross Kemp’s A-Z of Hell. As it worked pretty well at 2000 Trees the other week, I wanted to see how it went down in a comedy gig setting. The answer is mixed. The first half of it works pretty nicely, but I could feel the interest wane as I went on. I need to figure out where I want to go with it and how to end it. That said, the tried and tested stuff I opened with wasn’t quite as well received as normal.
On the plus side, a joke I wrote a few years ago – about a terrible gig I did in the West Yorkshire home town of a certain bearded serial killer – got some big laughs. I’d wanted to try it out for ages but would forget to do it when I had it written in my set. It’s always nice to get something positive out of a negative experience, even if the joke is rather morbid. But the night in question was my birthday, so I’m giving myself a free pass.
In other news, I am going to Edinburgh Fringe after all this year. But it will only be for five nights. I decided to book something last weekend. As I have zero tolerance for hostels after staying in too many in recent years, I thought I would try renting a room in student accommodation. For five nights, it came to £590. I thought I may as well go with it, as options would be limited and only more expensive.
Then I realised the dates I’d booked clashed with one of the train strikes, so I tried to rebook. The site then wanted to up the price to over £600, which was how much I paid to stay in Edinburgh for the entire month when I was last up in 2019. I tried entering my card details, but the site didn’t accept my card. So, then I just decided to cancel the whole thing. Instead of not going up at all, I looked on the same site I used in 2019 and found an en suite room in Leith for half the price of the other place.
And that’s where I’ll be staying for five nights in August. It’ll be nice to visit Edinburgh without the pressure of doing a show. But I know that after walking around there for five minutes, I know full well I’m going to be filled with feelings of envy and wish I was doing a show there for the month.