Royally Bored
Here's some useless information for you. My parents are hoarders. They are the kind of people that when they get to the holidays (they're teachers), they sort things. Not clear, but sort them. There's a big difference there. It basically means that every corner of their house is full up of stuff, and sometimes, around holiday time, it looks pretty tidy. If I were to take you there, the first thing I would do is show you is their collection of mugs. It is a ridiculously plentiful collection which takes up space in no less than 4 rooms. I am not even joking. To be fair to them, they do rotate them very regularly, so as to remind them of places they've been etc, but in all honesty (and I have told them this) that is what pictures are for. Tomorrow undoubtedly gives them an opportunity to extend their collection further. If this hasn't happened already, I'm sure it won't be too long before the William and Kate (or Wills and Kath, as I like to call them) wedding mug turns up on the royal mug shelf (oh yes, the royal mugs have their own shelf - the Charles and Di mug is looking a bit sorry for itself I have to say).
Yes, the royal wedding. I'm on the other side of the world and I still can't get away from it. I've heard some ridiculous things this week. I've heard no less than 5,000 police are going to be on duty for it. I had 2 ushers (Adam and Nathan actually) directing people down a country lane for where to park. I've heard that there are also 1,000 military on duty. I also saw on the news that a 76 year old woman plonked her chair down in Westminster on Tuesday afternoon and wasn't moving until the wedding. What does she think is going to happen? Get a last minute sympathy invite? There are few things that appeal to me less than sitting around for 3 days and nights, outside, purely to catch a glimpse of a woman getting out of a carriage. On the plus side, she probably made it on to last item on News at Ten, and when you've made it there, I guess you can die happy.
In case you hadn't guessed, this is one wedding that can pass me by thank you very much. Nothing against them, but the fuss is painful to watch. The only positive aspect is that we get an extra public holiday tomorrow in the UK, which, considering I am not only self-employed but also on the other side of the world, is rather useless to me. The royal family get 10 minutes of my time each year - the Queen's Christmas Day message, which is religiously watched in our family. Assuming I haven't missed a year, that's 5 hours and 10 minutes of time I'm never going to get back. So, the wedding won't be getting much of my attention I'm afraid. Luckily, I will be in the best position possible to give it a swerve. Either in bed, or in the back of the van on the way to San Francisco with my equally royally-apathetic bandmates.
San Francisco will be the 3rd to last show on this tour, which I can assure you has been an excellent time for us, and many memories have been created. And everyone has been holding up pretty well considering that we haven't had a day off on the whole tour. If you look on our itinerary, our tour manager lists our travel days as days off. This label has never seemed so ridiculous as on Sunday just gone. We played a lovely intimate show in Minneapolis on Saturday and then set off at 8am the next morning. If you've followed our whereabouts at all, you'll know the next show we played was in Vancouver. Not exactly down the road. When I turned onto the I-94, I saw something on the sat nav that I will probably never see again. In the bottom corner it said, 'Turn in 950 mls'. If you didn't get the abbreviation there, what that meant was, we were directed to stay on the same road for nine-hundred-and-fifty MILES. You're reading a guy that lives in a country about the size of Florida, so that was quite a shock to me. I'll tell you what it wasn't though. It wasn't a day off. We pounded 1,000 miles on Sunday, got to the hotel at 11.30pm, then the next day we did it all again, leaving at 8am, and arriving at midnight. Needless to say, we were mighty relieved to turn up and find out our hotel was literally on top of the venue for the following day. I had such a gloriously lazy morning, I even had a shave, which believe me, doesn't happen very often.
In case you hadn't noticed, facial hair has been a hot topic on this tour. Our guitar tech Rob (otherwise known as Eddie Rogert) inexplicably grew out a 5 month beard from our last batch of touring in the Autumn to this, and the first day he turned up in London in March was a shock, I can tell you. I think I may have even talked about it before, which isn't a problem, as it's well worth drawing attention to. Sadly the beard has a limited lifespan, as in a week's time, Nathan and Rob will be sunning their pale bodies in Jamaica at one of their best friend's weddings, and the beard, despite being the very definition of excellent, is not a look to pull off at a wedding. So Rob's beard is going through a nine stage process of getting chopped and we're calling it the Beardstravaganza. We are currently at stage 4, which is called The Gettysburg, for reasons that you will understand when you look at the pictures. They were blogged on our twitter if you fancy a flick through. Also, when checking The Gettysburg, you might want to consider that this guy is a qualified doctor. Without meaning to harp on about Rob too much, he is currently nursing some huge disappointment. His own musical project, Eddie Rogert, is new to facebook, and he has spent quite a while with 37 facebook friends. He has been stuck on 37 for so long, I was considering giving him a new nickname, until this morning, when he discovered his facebook friends had not gone up, but down to 36. This is facebook hurt of the highest order, and if any of you would like to take a minute to check out Eddie Rogert's page and just click on like, then you would make our bearded boy's day.
Finally, I realise that this blog has been on the good natured side, so I don't want to bring anyone down too much, but bad news seems to have popped up all too commonly lately, which includes this week. Conversation in the van will tell you that our thoughts are with anyone that has been affected by the tornadoes that have hit south-east America. Obviously, having a Tennessee guy in the band makes this quite close to home. Whilst the disaster's scale is much smaller than what happened in Japan, it is no less shocking, and it saddens me to know that families and communities have been torn apart as a result. I hope for a speedy recovery there, that's for sure.
I'll write off now, but before I do, I just wanted to again say thank you for those that have been turning up on this tour. It really has been a pleasure to meet some of you, and to sell out a lot of these shows aswell has made our job (and the drives in between) so much more enjoyable. And thank you too for the drinks and gifts we have been kindly given by some of you too, though if any of you offer me a William and Kate mug, it WILL go on ebay.
