It’s the end of a long week. I’m feeling it. I’m at the end of my string. It was just Jack, Estelle, Andy and the shreds and tatters of my voice tonight, with another tricky audience. Sometimes if it’s a big loud room I can vocalkick over them and silence the buggers with the right note, but at the end of 3 two show days I had no kick left and precious little upper register. I’m tired. We are all tired. It’s a good tired but it’s a tired tired. Undeniably tired tired. It’s always an onslaught doing the first week of this. Maybe more so considering we are coming out of a period of “this is impossible” and very possibly going back into something shitty. There’s some messy rhetoric going on right now. I have a feeling that before long we will see everybody talking to one another in capital letters again.
I’m writing this sitting in front of the woodburner. Jack and I are winding down in front of “Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons”. We’ve become slightly obsessed with Raphael the presenter. He’s our best mate. It’s a Netflix series, but counterintuitively you mustn’t watch the first season. Just click into season two when our man Raphael took over as presenter. Not to denigrate the much less weighty Irishman who did season one. He just didn’t have the je ne sais quoi to make it interesting for us.
We sit following our high energy audience corraling show, and we watch this empathetic hardened human getting stuck in to unbelievably nasty situations. It puts our various show specific woes into sharp relief. We can remember that we are just jokers telling a story and no matter what the boozed up accountant twit did it’s nothing compared to what he’s having to put up with in the Ukraine. Or Belize. Even Raphael isn’t sleeping in these prisons… But he at least gets them and knows how to earn a degree of respect from the prisoners.
Lou is here! She’s absolutely knackered though. She’s gone to bed. I’ll be there before long but had way too much adrenaline coursing through my system for an easy sleep and it’s early for me. But I get to hang out with her on my day off and show her the island. Apparently it won’t be pouring with rain or blowing horizontal ice tomorrow. I picked her up from the airport and we went to El Tico between shows. There’s the advantage to the huge gap between shows! We just have to activate our time more. I wouldn’t have covered so much ground today if Lou hadn’t been arriving. Frankly I’m likely to be more active than I would normally be tomorrow because I want to share Jersey. It’s still a novelty, being here, and doubly so being here with her.
Sleep is calling. A shower first as I stink. And then sleep. Oh sweet sweet joyful joyful sleep. Soon I think it’ll be possible.
AlBarclay 