A few lines

A tiring week, this week. We were at a theatre that’s been dark for the best part of two years, and I think it’s fair to say that it wasn’t really in the “receive position” for us [Insert Own Joke Here]. Monday (get-in day) was l-o-o-o-o-n-g and difficult. Thrillingly, though, the show’s been playing to full houses, which makes it seem as though there’s some point to it all.

We’re also past the halfway stage of the tour, so a game of “Murder” has been instigated. It’s done the trick of giving everyone a different focus and shaking things up a bit, but also means everyone is looking shifty and paranoid. Mind you, I’ve worked on shows where we didn’t need to fabricate that.

I managed to catch Question Time and was disappointed that Griffin wasn’t subjected to a proper interrogation. There was far too much posturing and hysteria, and, while that might be understandable, it didn’t really serve to expose his inadequacies. A missed opportunity.

Next week is a week off, and I must try and resist the urge to sit in my pants in front of the iPlayer for the entire seven days. Maybe five, give me that.

“Would you mind awfully if I – ” THUD.

My arms are shaking. Not wildly and madly, like I’m on children’s television. Just continually, like I’m coming off heroin. I had a ‘personal trainer taster session’ at the gym today. Thankfully, that description wasn’t taken too literally.

I’ve recently joined the gym and the chap who inducted me, John, was keen for me to take advantage of this free session, despite me making it clear that personal finances (lack of) made it highly unlikely that there’d be subsequent bookings.

So, today I’ve been holding weights at angles above my head that I could barely sustain, pulling things that didn’t want to be pulled, pushing things that didn’t want to be pushed, and getting myself into odd positions on large bouncy balls. At one point, he was talking to me, after having made me walk in a line with a kettle ball – kettle weight? kettle drum? kettle? – in each hand that I was holding above my shoulders, alternating with – oh, this is too difficult to describe. Look, I’d been carrying some weights, and then he wanted to explain something to me, and I seriously thought I was going to faint. And I had that lovely English feeling, of not wanting him to notice that I was going slightly cross-eyed, of not wanting to cause a fuss, as his voice faded out while his lips kept moving, and I started to wonder how unseemly it would be for a man in his thirties to be carried out of there by paramedics. I did recover, a minute or two later, at which point he was asking whether I wanted to do another set of the indescribable weight-walking thing, and I had to admit defeat. The memory of PE lessons of yore flooded back at that moment, and my adult self coalesced in a puddle round my trainers.

Oh, and at one point, I was performing core-stability exercises next to Bruno Tonioli from Strictly Come Dancing, which was a first for both of us.

IN SUMMARY: I’m knackered, but I saw a man off the telly.