I woke up with time to get to my gig in Huddersfield, but I don't recall there being a huge amount of time. Just enough.

I'd suggested that some of my schoolfriends (well, I'm not at school, but these guys were at school with me when I was, so let's call them schoolfriends for that reason) come to the gig in Huddersfield. I'd played the venue before, when I was a much less experienced act. It had gone very well for most of the performance and I had much better material this time. I was also closing the show, which should have given me a bit of extra clout. If you're introduced as the main act and you look confident, the audience will go for it... probably.

I drove to the gig, arriving early, but that's fine. It's always good to get time to relax. My friends arrived just in time. The gig got underway. The bill came mainly from the North West open-spot circuit. The audience were very generous and every act got a nice response. I went out there with gay abandon and decided to see if I could blast the audience out of "nice" into "excited". I've got the ability to give a big performance if I want to. I'm a big guy. I'm doing music-based stuff, which can tolerate being "bigged up". I just went for it. The audience joined me. If I was trying to show my friends that I was a good comedian, then I succeeded. As I've pointed out before, it's easy to look good when there's an audience laughing at your stuff. I'm not going to claim all the credit for the laughter in the room. They were a nice audience and I simply pushed their buttons for them. I hadn't planned to do as much as I did, but they were really going for it and I had permission from the MC to go on a bit longer... so I did "Fluffy", which is a good way to show myself that I trust an audience. I also used one of my special lines that I use to "bless" an audience I like. It's not funny, but I only use it when I know that the relation I have with the audience is special and that it will, therefore, get a laugh.

I had a great gig.

After the gig and some goodbyes with my happy-to-see-me-do-well friends, I headed off to the South for a late-night rendezvous with my girlfriend.

It was a late arrival. I was very tired. I slept well.