Belfast was just wonderful, thank you any of you who came along and packed out the Waterfront Hall with astonishing noise and energy. The response from the house was astonishing, and seeing everyone leaping to their feet in such a huge open hall was really fantastic. Thank you.

We visited the Giant’s Causeway, which, though I’m sure it’s just obligatory school trip territory to the locals, was a lovely afternoon trip. I realised the image I had carried around in my head of the Causeway since primary school was quite, quite different from the real thing. We had lunch at the Bushmills Inn (the whole of Bushmills smells of its famous malt) and headed back for the show.

The shows were very good, but on the third night my voice suddenly became worryingly absent. Two late nights with friends, a change in weather and a long run of shows had taken their toll, and I had to perform the last night with a more controlled tone than normal. This is a huge worry when this happens: keeping the voice strong is always the priority. If it goes, we have to pull shows, which is terrible.

Therefore I was not able to go out for signing on the last night, and unfortunately this will have to be the case for the next few nights until my voice is back to normal. It’s straight back to the hotel and into bed, rest as much as possible and then not speaking during the day. Steam, water, honey and lemon fill my wordless days until the shows. So a thousand apologies to anyone hoping to catch me after the shows: I am whisked away quickly, so please don’t waste your time waiting at the stage door for now thinking I’m still in there.

Hopefully things will be back to normal after a few days. I’ve also had to cancel meetings and interviews until this period passes.

Dublin tonight was huge fun: we were only the third show to appear in the brand new Grand Canal Theatre. Its a fantastic place. From the stage you can here each of the 2160 people as if they were sat right around you. The Dublin audience is different from those of Belfast: rowdier, funnier and very present. They were huge fun and a well-placed shout from one audience member had me and the backstage crew cracking up. So thank you for tonight, Dubliners. Looking forward to the next two.

Apologies again for not being able to come out and sign afterwards. Will let you know how that goes.

Meanwhile I must try to enjoy Dublin in silence…

x

Heartfelt letter received yesterday, regarding my portrait of Bush Jnr. above. Brilliant.

Dear Mr. Brown

The disrespect you show for the highest office of the land in the United States of America is reprehensible and the lowest, cheapest form of denigration imaginable.  How disgusting that you would choose to interpret the former President of the United States in such a way.

Absolutely appalling!

I was very impressed by the caricatures of other famous people, too bad you are so immature.  No matter what my politics are, I would never treat the present President in such a way, regardless of whether I agree with his beliefs or not.

Signed,
Susan Abernethy

(Picture by local artist)

Advance warning. You heard it here first. Do not, repeat DO NOT miss out on this one. They very rarely come to London, and they’re the best magic show in the world. Penn & Teller – the eternally cool bad-boys of magic – are rocking the Hammersmith Apollo from 14-17 July. Just a few nights, and it will pack right out. I saw it in Vegas a few years ago with Andy and Coops and we found ourselves gasping out loud and utterly mesmerised. It’s ingenious, funny, heartbreaking and provocative, and if there was ever a must-see in the world of magic, this is it.

The link is here – tickets go on sale on Friday.

Get in there quick, and if you find it sold out, keep trying for returns.

Dx

After the raucous delights of Northern audiences, it was down South to a very different sort of place. Again, the energy of the city was reflected in the audience, which is always so interesting: this time quiet and attentive, quite different from the previous nights. I spoke about this with a lovely couple who come to see the show a lot, back at the hotel over post-show booze and soup. The lady, a resident of Milton Keynes, insightfully pointed out that as a new town, MK has no real sense of community, no generation of people having grown up there, and correspondingly there was no sense of the audience as a solid, living entity in the same way there is in, say, Sunderland or Edinburgh where we had recently played. Instead, I felt, the MK crowd were (thankfully) polite and awaited their cues from me: a ‘vertical’ line of communication with little happening between them: little ‘horizontally’, as it were.

Acoustically the room held back a lot of the reactions too, so all in all the first night was a slight culture shock. The second night, as happens, felt warmer (in part, it was, and in part I had got used to the room). The nights were a pleasure to play, and volunteers were bright and fun. I have though been lulled into enjoying attentive and courteous audiences: tonight I am in Belfast, where once again there is a rich and powerful sense of community (or perhaps more strictly, communities), and much more tendency to heckle (not that I get much of that). Doubtless I’ll have a little shock again, and then tomorrow I shall ride it with ease.

I have spent the afternoon with a couple of talented friends from the mentalism world (Belfast’s David Meade and Toronto’s Thomas Baxter), chatting in part about some of the magnificently awful ways the medium Doris Stokes would garner information about her audience. Friendships with some of her touring party yielded some juicy secrets.

I must leave for the Waterfront. The crew have been there all day putting up the show in this massive concert hall: perhaps not aesthetically the best environment for the show, but a great room and a lovely in-house crew. If you’re coming tonight, I can’t wait to see you.

x

Three lovely nights in Sunderland. Great audiences and a lovely theatre. Thank you very much if you were there. After the fun with the broken mic and a cut finger the first night, the other two went pretty smoothly.

We stayed in the Newcastle Malmaison, which was just fantastic. A bottle of champagne and a concerned letter were awaiting me from the Edinburgh management which had come across the blog. That was very sweet of them, and made me feel a bit guilty.

One of the many delights of the Newcastle hotel came in the form of an unnamed Martini. I sometimes like to request a chocolate martini, asking the barpersonage to make whatever he or she feels fits that term. Sometimes you get clear, subtle versions; sometimes thick gloopy brown lovelinesses. The fun is never knowing what you’ll get. You might like to try it. The talented and splendid Aoife brought back three wildly different versions which we all tried after our late soup and sandwiches. All three amazing. We decided on the brown version, and set about discussing names for the cocktail. I suggested a ‘Brown Maltini’, liking the name of a drink named after me. Understandably, the ‘Brown’ bit felt a little cloacal for a drink name. We couldn’t decide, so I suggested that I might open it up to my bright and enlightened blog followers to suggest a name.
The picture attached shows Aoife with the drink (after I had quoffed half of it), and she has kindly allowed me to share the recipe:

Aoife’s As-Yet-Unnamed-Martini
1 half (ah, may be one-and-a-half) shot Remy Martin
1 half (hmm, ditto) shot Kahlua
1 half (surely must mean just half) shot creme de cacao

Garnish with choc powder.
Shake with ice and strain into martini glass.

Very tasty. Not a true Martini of course, of which I am very fond too, but a great, if outwardly girly, treat at the end of a long night.

If you have any suggestions for a name, please email alice.richardson@hotelduvin.com; you have about a week to bother them. No guarantees that any of the suggestions will make the menu, as it may have just been one of those 1am conversations that sounded like a good idea at the time. Rather like that small business you were going to start up with a friend. But they’re happy to take suggestions, and they’re the loveliest people.

Thank you, Newcastle Mal. Sting was staying there as well, apparently, which is pretty damn exciting in my book.

We’re now in Milton Keynes and I have my face in a big steam inhaler. Just had the 30 min call. Must dash.

x
PS I realised that in the blog about Bradford, when I said that in previous years ‘Dublin Olympia kept their bar open too’, it sounded like I was saying ‘as well as Bradford’. Poor and ambiguous wordage on my part, and apologies to St George’s Hall for not checking and re-wording. Meant only that Dublin left the bar open (understandable for what is really a music venue) as well as had people getting up to use the loo, which I had just been talking about. In fact the two go hand in hand…
Dublin will be extra fun this year anyway: a spanking new Grand Canal theatre we’re all eager to see. Ta-ta.