Green with Envy Northern Tour - 2007 (Part One)

Back from the Green with Envy tour of Northern England. Although all audiences were very friendly and jolly they were extremely sparse. I think probably because the publicity was pretty awful. Still we are terribly luvvie troupers and the show must go on so we sparkled convincingly in spite of everything.

Other interesting experiences included the Majestic Hotel in Barrow which may have been majestic once upon a time but alas has fallen upon hard times and would be better renamed as the Hotel Wretched. My room appeared to have a large throbbing engine in the ceiling space that the receptionist insisted was the wind - I stamped my luvvie foot and got moved

elsewhere. The notice below gives some idea of the behaviour expected from visitors - good to know that there are high standards left somewhere in the world.

The theatre was very smart but due to audience shortage we were moved into a side room where we would not rattle around as much. Fifteen minutes before curtain up my laptop imploded and we lost all the images, music and stuff around which the whole show is based. For some reason we had not backed everything onto Nigel’s machine so had a panicky ten minutes flinging pictures together in some order. Nigel’s images were mostly there and in the right order - mine had disappeared completely so I had to wing the whole of my part of the show using a random series of pictures. We coped and the audience was extremely tolerant of the chaos and went away happy.

On our return to the hotel the bar was occupied by the Ladies Darts League; a strong and vocal team.

The next morning we spent two hours in Barrow in Furness’s premier internet cafe (The Custom House, Abbey Road) desperately talking poor Celestria through the steps necessary to transfer the pictures from my office machine. Eventually we succeeded and trundled towards Lytham St Anne’s with a song in our hearts and via a very tolerable lunch at Levens Hall gardens - fantastic topiary. I filmed there for Small Town Gardens in 2003 and the yew is sculpted into all sorts of weird shapes that can be whatever you wish them to be - top hats, tangoing okapis, ferrets down the trousers of aldermen etc,etc.

Part two to follow..........

I am listening to Coffee and TV by Blur. The picture is of the view from my hotel bedroom - note the nuclear submarine.