Ok, I’ll start with the first of the weekend’s blogs documenting Friday.

So, Hannah texted the day beforehand to say that I was on my own so there’s a good start already. Anyway, I wrote a couple of blogs on the way down so I’ll just type them up here now.

11am
I’m grumpy. I can tell you exactly why this is and the reason is simply because I’m tired. Why am I tired at 11am? Well it’s clearly cos I got up close enough to 6am to make sure I caught the 8am bus to London.

Ok, so this bus takes six hours to get to London so why don’t I have a kip? That’s simple: there are meatheads in front of me talking stupidly loudly and they won’t shut up. I have to have my iPod at pretty much maximum volume to dorwn out their drivel. I really feel like screaming at them and telling them to shut the hell up but that’s just rude, but then again, I guess they are too.

Is it eavsedropping if you’re not purposefully trying to hear a conversation? So far I’ve amassed that they’re going to see the Foo Fighters at Wembley and that Supergrass are the support act tonight, however they’d rather be going tomorrow as tomorrow’s support are The Futureheads. Just the kind of stuff I could have done without knowing.

Ok, so that’s public knowledge but how about this: the woman in front of me nearly missed getting on this bus because the breakfast club where she dropped her kid off at has changed its opening time from 7:30am to 7:45am. Oh, and a couple of them got a room in a Hilton hotel for £29 because they know someone who works there. Fantastic. I only stopped listening to my music for a few minutes and this is what I can’t help but not hear.

4:30pm
I’m finally on the train to Salisbury after traipsing round the hell that is London in a quest to find this year’s Fringe programme. You’d probably expect, as I did, that because their website says you can pick it up from certain branches of HMV that said branches would have received a batch on launch day. No such luck. They’ve screwed up this launch good and proper.

I guess I should’ve pre-empted this and gone straight to see Kirsty but unfortunately there’s this part of me that’s ever the optimist. Damn you optimism. Damn you to hell.

So yes, I got to Salisbury at about 6pm where I met Kirsty at the station after being by myself for 10 hours. It was so nice to actually talk to someone I can tell you that now. We then headed to a sports bar of kinds, which was practically empty but made a damn good dinner, before heading to Salisbury Playhouse to go stalk Mark Watson.

I went and picked up the ticket I’d booked the day before to the night’s events, which was essentially “a book thing” for Mark’s new book, ‘Crap At The Environment’, due to be released soon. The premise was that as the book’s an environmental thing that Mark was to talk to Brig Ousbridge, a hippie from the 60s. Sounds well and good on paper but when I can back from the loo to find Kirsty and Mark conversing I found out that Mark hadn’t the foggiest what was going to happen and that he’d never met Brig before. Sounds like a recipe for disaster if you ask me.

Mark also divulged that he’d come up with a premise for a sitcom whereby he moves in next-door to Timothy and madness ensues. Ok, I twisted the truth slightly. Mark said he was looking for a new house and one of the one’s he’d looked at was next to Tim’s, which he said would make a great sitcom if it happened.

Mark then disappeared to do some tech stuff and to actually meet Brig before the show and decide what it was that they were going to talk about and we were left alone to talk, though it wasn’t long before they set up a table to flog copies of the book from, which wasn’t too shabby considering the book launch wasn’t til just under a week after then. Clearly Kirsty and I did the only sensible thing at that point and went and bought ourselves copies of the book and flicked through it and had a quick nosey over the bit about his marathon show last year to bring back memories for the both of us.

Not long after Kirsty’s dad showed up and we went and started the queue to get into the small venue. The show itself can only be described as interesting, in both senses of the word. There was a bit of a chat between the two to start with and then Mark read out the opening chapter of the book to the room. At that point he was unsure about if he should stand to read it because he felt self-concious and was quite enjoying sitting down but the decision from the crowd was unanimous that he should stand so he did. After he did his reading we had more talking, where we learned that you can get to most places in Eurasia by bus and there was also talk of the Big Green Gathering, which is a festival that Brig puts on each year. It was all rounded off with a Q and A session before Mark headed out to the table where we bought our books from to sign copies for people and in mine and Kirsty’s cases, have photos taken with them too. He couldn’t stay long as he had a train to catch but before he disappeared we were nice and gave him cakes for him and Wife to eat on the journey home.

Lessons learnt: Travelling alone for ten hours isn’t fun so make the journey as short as possible so that you don’t go crazy and Mark is lovely, though to be fair, I reckon I already knew that.