What a beautiful place. I’d never walked around it before, but this time I had a great stroll around. And if you’re looking for somewhere to stay, there’s nowhere other than the Captain’s Club Hotel: amazing food and the friendliest, most attentive, spoil-you-rotten service.

The BIC is a great barn of a venue to play. The audiences were lovely, but the acoustics are rotten for any performer. From the stage you can only hear the front row’s responses, so it took some assurance from Jonas, our sound guy, that the audience was responding with more than the slow, single trickling hand-clap that was reaching my ears. Equally, those of you at the back were VERY far away – I hope you could make everything out that you were supposed to.

It was one of those few venues where we have to build everything – the stage, everything, from scratch, so our dedicated assembly team, and the in-house crew were just amazing. Thank you everyone, it is always a mammoth task.

I had a few days off, and spent them painting a picture of Rufus Wainwright. Miserably, it wasn’t working, so I am going to ditch it and start again: annoyingly, it made me come  back to the tour feeling unhappy and unsettled. But sitting by the river here reading Proust and tucking into amazing seafood has perked me up suitably, and the ordering of the iPad (wifi-3G of course) has provided an exciting punctuation point at the end of this little jaunt. Tonight you’ll be aware, UNLESS YOU’VE BEEN LIVING IN A CAVE FOR THE PAST THREE WEEKS, a series of documentaries starts about modern-day troglodytes and their habitation patterns. Following that, your blogger goes about looking at paranormal things. There are but three of these docs, so make sure you catch them. They’ve been great fun – and sometimes gruelling – to do, and I hope to make some more if people like them. I’ve really approached the subjects ready to be convinced and with an open mind (open, but not so open that my brain falls out).

Hope you enjoy them – thank you Bournemouth: must dash now to Wimbledon, there are others that need me.

x

PS ‘Blue Movie’ – yes, I know. Long story.